On 02/10/2007, Shlomi Fish <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Hi all! > > There is an interesting discussion about Perl here: > > http://discuss.joelonsoftware.com/default.asp?joel.3.546349.20
There are many discussions like this one, and i don't have much to say about it. However i do have something to say about an atricle that is linked from one one of the comments: http://steve.yegge.googlepages.com/ancient-languages-perl It is written by a long-time Amazon.com employee, it is very long, it name-checks J. Gosling, A. Kay and other CS luminaries; these things are supposed to add authorities to it. But in the same time it is as pointless as the example email from the documentation to Damian's Text::Autoformat: http://search.cpan.org/~dconway/Text-Autoformat-v1.14.0/lib/Text/Autoformat.pm#The_problem The author simply picks one (and a half) Perl feature that he dislikes and rants about it ad nauseam. Perl's greatest sins, according to him, are: 1. Flattening lists: (1, 2, (3, 4, 5)) is the same as (1, 2, 3, 4, 5) and, according to him, it's a disaster. 2. References. They are a disaster, just because. The solution to "problem" no. 1 is to simply write [1, 2, [3, 4, 5]]; but actually, i never had to do it, because *it is not a real world problem*, but a useless code example. It is possible to write ugly and useless code examples in any language. Problem no. 2, well - a lot of people complain about it, but this article really pissed me off, because lately i implemented a solution to a *real world problem*, that is - i got paid for it and a company is happily using it to generate revenue. In the center of that solution there is a complex tree data structure. To create it i used pure Perl with its references and lists (and hashes, of course). perlol, perldsc, perlref and all that. The solution is efficient, scalable *and* maintainable and it was implemented in almost zero time. So, Perl is still the language for getting my job done. P.S. The author consistently mispels D. Conway's name. Why am i even wasting time on him?.. _______________________________________________ Perl mailing list [email protected] http://perl.org.il/mailman/listinfo/perl
