[OT] the Perl thing (was: Re: Introduction)

On Fri, Mar 02, 2001 at 11:33:11AM -0500, Eric S. Raymond wrote:
> cmpilato@collab.net <cmpilato@collab.net>:
> > I've heard/read this statement on more than a few occasions, and each
> > time I seem to have failed to understand the basis for the statement.
> > In my experience, the maintainability of a piece of software is tied
> > far less to the language of choice or the size of the program, but
> > instead is directly proportional to how that language was weilded, and
> > how thoroughly that code was documented.
>
> Of course. A poor programmer will write bad code in any language.
>
> This issue is whether your language of choice makes it easy to write
> clean, maintainable code or difficult to do it. Clean code can be
> done in Perl, but requires more work than it ought to. I'm lazy and
> don't like to work that hard :-).

Eric hit it on the head. It is easy to write crap in Perl. You have to be
very experienced to avoid that. Other languages make it more difficult to do
so.

I spent several hours once *trying* to write obfuscated Python. It was quite
difficult.

So, Mike: in an ideal world, what you say is true: everybody will write nice
Perl. But most people simply don't because they don't have the necessary
capability to do so.

---------------

All that said, I'll reiterate my earlier comment: I *hope* Jens writes the
Perl bindings. I won't use them, but I want them available for others.

I have no problem with Perl or people who use Perl. I just avoid it whenever
I can (sometimes unsuccessfully :-( which is why I've learned to dislike
the thing).

Cheers,
-g

-- 
Greg Stein, http://www.lyra.org/