On Wed, 2004-03-10 at 10:07, Jaco Swart wrote:
> >Haha. I knew somebody would bite sooner or later.
> >
> I was just curios to know why Michael loaths Perl :-)
If you really want to know, I will give my take on the Language Wars.
---= Y p3r1 5ux, by mich431 th4 h4x0r =---
* Perl suffers the same problem as TCL, sh and (non-visual) Basic
in that it is hard write a program over 25 lines that does not
descend into a pile of spaghetti. Other languages — such as
Moduala-2, C, Smalltalk and Python — force you to write
structured code that is easy to read and maintain. The good
ones, like Samlltalk and Python, do it in such a way you do not
even know you are being encouraged to write good code.
* Too complex for the simple things. If I want to write some code
to munge data from one file into another, then I use AWK or sed
(simple, does one thing well). If either is too simple, then I
will use Python or C (see the first point for why).
* Too many ways to do things. Usually I do not want to have to
worry about the benefits of writing a loop one way compared with
another. If I really cared about how the system interpreted my
code I would use C or assembler. Then I have *real* control.
* Perl's data structures bite. Evidence for the prosecution:
declare an array (also known as a hash-table or dictionary) that
contains other arrays and try to access an element from an inner
array.
* "Programing = Algorithms + Data Structures". Perl requires you
to thing about the algorithms too much, and its data structures
bite. Therefor, Perl sux.
It has been too long for me to come up for any more reasons. Perl 6
will be a far better language than Perl 5, but I will not bother moving
from Python :)
--
Michael JasonSmith http://www.ldots.org/
