Jim Self wrote:
One of the FORTRAN projects I was given to maintain made even Fileman's generated code look good, let alone Fileman itself. It was full of computed GOTO's and no documentation anywhere and was decidely unmaintainable.
Impressive. Computed gotos were certainly one of the more horrible aspects of fortran. They were dropped in fortran 95 in recognition of Dijkstra's impassioned plea in his 1968 paper (Go To Statement Considered Harmful) where he wrung his hands and bemoaned "the quality of programmers is a decreasing function of the density of Go To statements in the programs they produce."
> I can't imagine that anything a conscientious
programmer might create in Perl could be so bad.
Well...the obfuscated perl contest has several beautiful examples each year. ;-)
I think maintainable code depends mostly on the maturity of the programmer in the end. A mature programmer makes allowances and adjusts the language to suit maintainability more.
I think mature programmers recognize that quick and dirty hacks tend to become permanent hacks. Perl, being capable of doing almost anything, and doing it in many ways, does tend to encourage quick and dirty hacks, which in turn tend to become unmaintainable permanent hacks.
[Come to think of it, this morning I used perl 4 for dos (a 230kB download) on a script to do some spreadsheet arranging in a tiny amount of memory in a disgustingly quick and dirty manner. I was liberal with the comments though, so I expect it will be maintainable.]
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