On Wed Oct 15, 2008 at 20:13:31 +0100, Stephen Rowles wrote:
> As a replacement for something like bash, I think perl is a great thing.
Agreed.
> However for applications I hate perl! It is far to easy to write perl code
> that is impossible to read, and some of those magic perl tricks can make
> it even worse! There are so many nasty horrible things you can do with
> perl, and far to many people use them ;) (usually all of them at once if
> they possibly can!)
Every time I hear this complaint I think of myself. I say exactly
the same thing about the majority of PHP code I touch - but that is
probably because I'm cleaning up security holes.
Honestly I don't understand why Perl has this reputation. It is
possible to do clever "tricks" in any environment interesting enough
to be useful. Similarly a bad coder will be a bad coder regardless
of implementation language.
I could give examples of bad PHP, bad C, bad C++, and many more
without too much effort. Similarly things that are tricks to some
people are idiomatic expressions to others. (e.g. the first time
a saw Duff's Device in C, or the temp-free XOR swap trick in C.)
> I think perl is a good tool, just often mis-used for things where it
> really isn't the best tool for the job.
I think junior developers are good, but often mis-used for applications
which later become important ..
Steve
--
http://www.steve.org.uk/
