At 03:45p -0400 08/05/2006, David Livesay didst inscribe upon an
electronic papyrus:
On Aug 5, 2006, at 3:23 PM, Ronald J Kimball wrote:
Perl provides more flexibility than many other languages - it gives you
enough rope to hang yourself. On the one hand, this gives the programmer a
lot of power. On the other hand, it invites people to spread FUD about
Perl code being hard to maintain. Poorly-written Perl code can be hard to
maintain, just as in any language. A good programmer can write Perl code
that is easily-maintainable.
By that metric, there are no good programmers who write Perl. I have
yet to see two Perl coders agree on what Perl is well-written and
what Perl is badly written. Every time you hire a consultant to
maintain a Perl script they end up rewriting the whole damn thing
because "the last guy didn't know what he was doing." This is the
case even when "the last guy" was the very same guy six months ago.
For me, the real enemy of maintainability is not so much language
choice or code quality, or lack of comments of what a line of code
does, but rather *why* it does it. Even such things as filenaming
conventions can cause a lot of second guessing. "Why did I decide it
should not have the third infix in this case? Did I take into account
all the determining factors? Maybe I decided wrong!"
So please don't blame the language. That's like shooting the messenger.
-boo
who often forgets to document reasonings, and then cries later.
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