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In lugnet.off-topic.debate, Jasper Janssen writes:
> The problem with perl, I am told, is that it's also incredibly easy to
> do things exactly the wrong way.
It's no toy.
> In fact, it's vastly easier than to do it the right way.
It's not a good language to teach Computer Science with.
BTW, there is arguably never any "right" way. Just different ways to do
things that either work correctly or don't work correctly -- or perform
correctly but inefficiently.
Neither Pascal nor Modula-2 nor Java nor any other of the "pretty" languages
will ever save a fundamentally poor programmer and allow him/her to magically
write good code. You can write garbage in any language. Perl, like Lisp and
most other high-level langauges, makes it easier to write garbage than most
languages do, but on the other hand it also makes it easier to write correct
code than most languages. It's a double-bladed sword, to be sure.
> Just like in any other language, of course, but
> in perl, "there is always more than one way to fsck up"
All languages actually have that property. The others just hide it better.
Languages with crippled syntactic and semantic models force programmers to
jump through hoops to do things the hard way, and that's how they fsck up.
Perl is not a computer language for people who enjoy training wheels.
> Perl is made by throwing features at a wall and seeing what sticks.
> Discuss.
You make that sound like a bad thing. Perl is like English. It's not
pretty, but it does everything you want it to if you're willing to invest
the time learning it.
--Todd
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Message has 2 Replies:
 | | Re: Perl rules!
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| (...) Hey, I'm going to have to take issue with that. English can be a very beautiful language. It can also be an ugly language, but that doesn't mean that it can't be amazing poetry in the right hands. So actually it's a pretty good analogy. :) (25 years ago, 13-Jul-99, to lugnet.off-topic.debate, lugnet.off-topic.geek)
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Message is in Reply To:
| | Re: Perl rules!
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| (...) The problem with perl, I am told, is that it's also incredibly easy to do things exactly the wrong way. In fact, it's vastly easier than to do it the right way. Just like in any other language, of course, but in perl, "there is always more (...) (25 years ago, 27-Jun-99, to lugnet.off-topic.debate, lugnet.off-topic.geek)
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