On Mon, 19 Aug 2002, at 7:18pm, Derek D. Martin wrote: > Perl seems to have gone out of its way to work like other common Unix > tools/languages (shell scripting, C, sed/grep), in others it seems to go > out of its way to do things in such a way as to be as confusing as > possible.
How is that different from any other language? Most languages borrow from other languages, and yet still do things their own way. Compare C++, Java, and C#, for example. > An example of this would be the equivalent of a structure in C (or Pascal > or whatever). This is an accident. In general, Perl was not designed -- it evolved. It started small, and then creeping featurism ran rampant on it. Much like Unix, there are a great many things in Perl that don't make a lot of sense unless you know the history behind them. > The people who like to program Perl seem to have a propensity to prefer to > write code which takes advantage of all the obscure features, and > generally to write code which is unreadable. I think you put far too much weight on the "recreational hackers" who favor neat tricks. It is one thing to fire off one-liners because one can; it is quite another to do so in "real life". It is quite possible to write professional-quality, well-documented, non-obscure Perl code. The fact that some people take pleasure from not doing so does not make Perl a bad language. And while it does seem like the Perl community has a large percentage of people who like recreational hacking, I think that just reflects Perl's roots as a language that was evolved through usage. -- Ben Scott <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> | The opinions expressed in this message are those of the author and do not | | necessarily represent the views or policy of any other person, entity or | | organization. All information is provided without warranty of any kind. | _______________________________________________ gnhlug-discuss mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://mail.gnhlug.org/mailman/listinfo/gnhlug-discuss