W
William Goedicke
Dear Y'all -
As a preferatory note let me say that I've been writing perl for a
decade or so now and, I love perl. It allows me to concentrate my
sporadic programming efforts on a single tool because of its breadth
of functionality.
I've got some friends whose programming activity is not at all like
the sporadic hacks that I engage in. They're extremely expert
programmers with advanced programming degrees from MIT who are
developing things like tank simulations for the DoD in lisp and other
more arcane languages. With the one caveat that it may be OK for a
piker like me who doesn't need to code anything major, they speak of
perl with utter contempt.
The point of this message is that I'd like to open a discussion that
identifies exactly what it is about Perl as a language that offends
the literati of programming and, respecting that there may be some
valid points there, how we can code to avoid the problems these issues
may lead to.
My best understanding of what they think the problem is that Perl is
"context sensitive". That is it behaves differently when data
changes, if lists slip in where scalars were intended the results may
be wildly different than expected. This wouldn't be true in strongly
typed languages like C or lisp.
Do others have knowledge of such (and possibly other) criticisms and,
what do you think we should do to avoid the associated pitfalls.
- Billy
============================================================
William Goedicke (e-mail address removed)
Cell 617-510-7244 http://www.goedsole.com:8080
============================================================
Lest we forget:
"ff0000" (html for bright red) turns out to be as good
an indicator of spam as any pornographic term.
- Paul Graham
As a preferatory note let me say that I've been writing perl for a
decade or so now and, I love perl. It allows me to concentrate my
sporadic programming efforts on a single tool because of its breadth
of functionality.
I've got some friends whose programming activity is not at all like
the sporadic hacks that I engage in. They're extremely expert
programmers with advanced programming degrees from MIT who are
developing things like tank simulations for the DoD in lisp and other
more arcane languages. With the one caveat that it may be OK for a
piker like me who doesn't need to code anything major, they speak of
perl with utter contempt.
The point of this message is that I'd like to open a discussion that
identifies exactly what it is about Perl as a language that offends
the literati of programming and, respecting that there may be some
valid points there, how we can code to avoid the problems these issues
may lead to.
My best understanding of what they think the problem is that Perl is
"context sensitive". That is it behaves differently when data
changes, if lists slip in where scalars were intended the results may
be wildly different than expected. This wouldn't be true in strongly
typed languages like C or lisp.
Do others have knowledge of such (and possibly other) criticisms and,
what do you think we should do to avoid the associated pitfalls.
- Billy
============================================================
William Goedicke (e-mail address removed)
Cell 617-510-7244 http://www.goedsole.com:8080
============================================================
Lest we forget:
"ff0000" (html for bright red) turns out to be as good
an indicator of spam as any pornographic term.
- Paul Graham