Otto Wyss wrote on 3/26/01 5.41:
>A study in Science (291
>P.2165) found out that
>english speaking children has
>twice as much reading
>problems as italian speaking
>children of the same age.
>And about similar difference
>towards german and french.
>This could come from the
>fact that english has for 40
>phonetics over 1100 kinds of
>writing while italian has for
>25 phonetics only 33 kinds of
>writing (sorry I hope I've
>translated it into correct
>terms). Also 9 years old
>english children produce
>more reading error than 7
>years old austrian children.
The reward? English-speaking children learn what is arguably the most
flexible and expressive spoken language in the world.
>This is exactly like I feel
>when I see a Perl script. Lots
>and lots of special symbols,
>special cases. And several
>where it's not easy to
>understand. This might come
>from the fact Perl was/is
>designed by english speaking
>people. It seems that the
>complexity of english writing
>is directly integrated into
>Perl.
Yup. Remember, Larry Wall is a linguist by training--he learned in school
about human languages. He applied this knowledge to Perl. While I agree
that there /are/ a lot of special symbols and stuff, it ought to be fairly
easy to write a script you can run on any Perl script that adds 'use
English;' to the top of a script and translates all the special variables
into their English.pm equivalents. They may not be French or Austrian
variable names, but they'll be more readable.
On another note, perhaps we should set up something where longer names for
some special variables are built in. How's $}PERLVERSION sound?
> On the contrast Pascal
>was designed by german
>speaking person (Wirth). I'm
>not saying Perl should
>become Pascal nor Pascal
>like, I only want to show the
>difference. While Pascal (at
>least standard Pascal) was so
>limited, it's still possible to
>read
>20 years old programs. Well
>Larry once said "... lots of
>languages that come out of
>Europe have this thing of ..."
>(http://archive.develooper.c
>om/perl6-language%40perl.
>org/msg05283.html). This
>also might be related to the
>language.
Perl is hard to compare with any other languages except those it borrowed
heavily from or those that borrowed heavily from it. I don't think Perl has
borrowed much from Pascal (besides maybe the " : " syntax for attributes) so
Perl and Pascal are hard to compare.
>I have come to Perl6 just
>about a month ago, so I can't
>give much advice what
>should be done. Also I'm not
>too accustomed to Perl to
>spot weaknesses. All I can do
>is give some general advice.
>
>- Make readability your
>main objective. Readability is
>possibly the weakest part of
>Perl.
Of course. However, I found that the readability of Perl was greatly
enhanced by the Llama. :^)
Though many of the design decisions in Perl lend themselves to obfuscation,
the final decision of readability lies with the guy writing Perl, not with
the guy writing perl. We should, however, consider readability when we add
New Magic to Perl.
>- Keep your eyes on
>modularity. Modularity is by
>far the best concept where
>complexity could be hidden.
>
>- Don't forget usability. This
>is after all the point why
>people use Perl in the first
>place.
Never.
So the basic question is, readability or usability? I say usability.
--Brent Dax
Excuse typos, it's hahd to write on a Palm...
