En op 20 maart 2002 sprak Abigail:
> The majority of the people programming Perl don't even know
> anything about Japhs, golf or obfuscated Perl. Don't consider
> the inbred circle of people on the various mailinglist, clpm,
> #perl, and perlmonks as the average Perl programmer. They aren't,
> they are the intimicy. And what they do on their mailinglists,
> newsgroups and websites remains hidden for most of the world.
Agreed.
And yet this majority, in my experience, all too often
comment on how "weird" or "hard to read" Perl is. :-(
So I think Randal's JAPHs are not to blame at all.
At work, I always try to teach young Perl programmers a nice clean
coding style -- never ever corrupting them by mentioning golf or
JAPHs or even Buffy looking in the mirror. No, really I do.
And yet I am often bitterly disappointed to hear them remark
how "quirky" or "weird" Perl is. Only today, I was explaining
this to a Perl beginner:
use strict;
sub process_file {
my $fname = shift;
open(my $fh, $fname) or die "error: open '$fname':$!\n";
# Process file ...
# No need to explicitly close $fh (cool).
}
Yet to my dismay, he thought the elegant:
open(my $fh, $fname) or die "error: open '$fname':$!\n";
was "really weird". These guys seem to think if it is not
if-then-else, it is weird. Sigh.
/-\ndrew
