On Thu, 2004-02-19 at 14:17, David Boyes wrote: > I don't deny Perl is useful. Larry Wall is considered to be a genius for a > number of reasons -- inventing a superior scripting language to csh or > Bourne scripts is (IMHO) the least of his achievements. > > I *do* claim that Perl is unnecessarily syntactically grotesque -- in all ...
I'm getting the impression that you generally don't like dealing with
pointers and references...
> PHP and Python are somewhat better,...
PHP? Joking right? PHP's OO implementation is GROTESQUE. I mean I use
it, its great for doing Q&D web work, but better than perl? Ok it
cleaned up the $/@/*/[]/()/{} mess, but it did it by forcing a one-one
correspondence between a variable name and a data structure. UGH....
(references point to a variable, not to the data structure ... and
assignment does a full copy of the structure ... try figuring that out
the first time when your boss is crawling up your back).
> but REXX is far cleaner and far easier
> to understand at a glance (and teach to normal mortals with real jobs other
> than computing) than any of the other three, IMHO. I always considered the
> System Product Interpreter Users Guide one of the best self-teaching manuals
> ever written -- *any* random yo-yo can learn enough REXX to be useful from
> that book.
Well, waaay back when we had an intern (nephew of the CEO no less) who
we did just that and said here's a file we need cleaned up. (hey, I
wasn't his super). Shortly thereafer the system started to run
horribly slowly... turned out he had learned just enough rexx and xedit
macros to make rexx build a rexx/xedit macro, open the file in xedit,
change ONE line and close it... against a 40k line file. Guy wasn't
dumb, and you can learn Rexx quickly, but learning quick is not the same
as learning right.
-- TWZ
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