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On Mon, 28 Jun 1999 00:23:51 GMT, "Todd Lehman" <lehman@javanet.com>
wrote:
> In lugnet.off-topic.debate, Jasper Janssen writes:
> 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.
Yeah, I had a nice discussion on this exact subject a while ago
elsewhere.
Maintainability is usually more important than efficiency or looking
pretty. However, to be maintainable, code has to be written in ways
that can be understood easily. Therefore, they must be pretty (by my
definition of pretty anyway).
>
> Neither Pascal nor Modula-2 nor Java nor any other of the "pretty" languages
Pascal or Modula-2 "pretty"? First time I've heard anyone claim that.
> 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
Some just make it harder than others.
> 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.
Perl is a good way to quickly hack up single-usage stuff that's not
too large, and/or doesn't need to be maintained (by persons other than
the author, especially).
Many procedural programming languages explicitly force you to think in
terms of procedures/functions, which makes it harder to write
spaghetti code.
> > 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.
True. Perl _does_ however have more ways than most, for many things.
> 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.
The problem is that you do _not_ want bad programmers writing stuff
you might have to maintain in perl. Sure, _you_ can write good code in
any language you choose, but does that mean it should be made easier
for your cow-orkers to write undecipherable stuff?
> > Perl is made by throwing features at a wall and seeing what sticks.
> > Discuss.
This one is for .pun, by the way...
>
> 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.
Are you saying English as a language is a good thing?
As always, you choose the right tool for the job. In some cases, this
is perl, in others, it's something else.
I've seen perl scripts that were literally a few dozen system() calls
strung together. I've seen C programs that look like perl, I've seen
perl that looks like FORTRAN...
All software sucks, it just does so in subtly different ways.
Advocacy is bad.
Jasper
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Message has 1 Reply:
 | | Re: Perl rules!
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| (...) I'd put correctness above maintainability, in the sense that, although maintainable code needs to be able to stay correct, code ought to be correct in the first place. And above correctness, the code ought to be solving the right problems (...) (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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| (...) It's no toy. (...) 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 (...) (25 years ago, 28-Jun-99, to lugnet.off-topic.debate, lugnet.off-topic.geek)
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