On Wednesday, 28 February 2018 at 20:01:34 UTC, H. S. Teoh wrote:
Just to give some background. At work I spend most of my time
maintaining legacy systems adding some small features or
replacing subcomponents. So most of what I do is reading code and
making some minor changes (unless it's buggy code then you get to
rewrite :))
The idea of sigils is actually not a bad one. It does, after
all, have basis in natural languages. But the way it was
implemented in Perl is, shall we say, rather quirky, leading to
all sorts of unexpected interactions with other things and
generally become a cognitive burden in large projects, where a
disproportionate amount of time is spent fighting with syntax
rather than getting things done. (E.g., is it @$x[$y] or $x->y
or ${x}{y} or ${x->$y}[$z] or something else?)
Perl is a maintenance nightmare. It just takes so much time to
figure out what the code actually does. Particularity if it has
been changed by multiple people over the years.
That's the main reason Perl is at the top of my most disliked
languages.
Yeah, that's 10 trains worth of WATs right there. :-D
And the whole thing about == vs === is just one huge WAT. It
"makes sense" if you understand why it's necessary, but it just
begs the question, why, oh why, wasn't the language designed
properly in the first place so that such monstrosities aren't
necessary?!
Another personal favorite.
function foo($myArray) {
return $myArray['test'];
}
$myString = "hello, world";
$test = foo($myString);
echo $test; // $test = 'h'; Because you know 'test' auto converts
to 0.
Now PHP does have many WATs but it's still simpler to read than
Perl so it has an edge over Perl for me atleast.
Compared to them, programming in C++ or Java for that matter
is like a dream.
C++ is hardly any better, actually:
https://bartoszmilewski.com/2013/09/19/edward-chands/
Yeah... C++ is interesting in that way. Mostly what I have seen
is that for any given project they have a strict policy of how to
do memory management and error handling. Also it's not really a
pleasure reading C++ templates :D.
Java... well, Java is a walled garden, a somewhat nice (if
verbose) one that's somewhat detached from reality, but
forcefully anchored to it by big commercial interests. As a
language it's not too bad; the core language is pretty nicely
designed -- in an idealistic, ivory tower sort of sense.
But in practice, it's more of a Write Once, Debug Everywhere
deal. The verbosity and IDE dependence sucks. The OO
fanaticism also sucks (singleton classes IMO is a big code
smell, esp. when it's really just syntactic lip service to the
OO religion for what's essentially global functions). The lack
of real generics is total suck, and a showstopper for me. Even
the half-hearted attempt at generics that they shoehorned into
it later doesn't fully save it from being sucky. The only
saving grace of Java is the extensive library support -- you
can find just about anything you might imagine as a library,
which saves you from dealing with the suckier parts of the
language. Most of the time.
The awful and nice part of Java is that since your forced to do
things a certain way then things will actually be done in that
way. In this case OOP and all of that. It's nice when you read
the code, awful when you actually have to code in it.
Only thing missing is the ability to do arbitrary system calls
during compilation :D
AKA
compile-my-source-code-and-get-a-trojan-installed-on-your-system. :-D If this ?
(mis)feature ever gets merged into DMD, give me a call right
away -- I have a lot of source code to sell you. For free. :-D
Why must you ruin my perfect plan of getting a free botnet! :D
