On Saturday 21 June 2008, Adam Fine wrote:
> Hi Shlomi!
>
> I'm not sure why you chose the Array#inject solution for the first problem.
> It's one of the more obscure ways of achieving your stated goal.
>
> The natural Ruby equivalent to your Perl solution would be:
>
> h = {}
> a.map {|k| h[k] = true}
Yes, but this takes two statement. Cognitively, it is one operation and so I
want to do it in a single statement.
>
> Even this is clearer than the Perl solution, of which it is a direct
> translation.
I have no problem reading the Perl solution, and neither would any
intermediate Perl programer. And doesn't the map call build a long list?
> But if this is a clarity contest, then here's the clearest
> Ruby solution I could think of:
>
> h = {}
> for key in a
> h[key] = true
> end
>
This uses a loop (which is probably slow) and is 4 lines long. It's not a
clarity contest, and there is no problem in the clarity of the Perl program.
> It doesn't get much cleaner than that :)
>
> Anyone who ever programmed any modern dynamic language - Javascript, Lua,
> Python, PHP, Perl - understands immediately what this code does. On the
> other hand, one would need at least several days of specific Perl
> experience to understand what's going on here:
>
> my %h = (map { $_ => 1 } @a);
Right, but it's idiomatic Perl and you can ask or look it up, and it's the
common idiom to do that.
>
> The direct Perl translation of my last solution is:
>
> my %h; for my $i (@a) { $h{$i} = 1; }
>
> It's pretty obvious which form is clearer :)
The former one to me, which is probably also faster.
>
> To sum up, we translated directly your solution to Ruby, and ended up with
> cleaner code. Then we demonstrated what must be one of the clearest
> solutions possible, implemented in Ruby. Then we translated the clear
> solution back to Perl, and clarity was degraded.
>
> I have nothing against Perl; it's a wonderful project that contributed a
> lot to the programming world. Perl 6 will hopefully continue to do so. But
> Perl 5 - all its merits notwithstanding - was never the cleanest or
> clearest of languages, while Ruby would be tough to beat in that category,
> even for the best of them :)
>
Why are people so obsessed with the "clarity" of such small scopes? While Perl
Golf and Obfuscated Perl are very much non-clear, one can write clear code in
Perl that will be obvious to people with minimal amount of experience. And if
you don't have a solid amount of experience in any language, you're going to
write buggy or even dangerous code (re: most PHP code out there).
My intention with the exercise was to show how one can idiomatically perform
these two tasks.
However, see
http://www.perl.org.il/pipermail/perl/2005-August/thread.html#7327 ("The Cost
of Newlines") for a different POV.
> Hope everything is great with you, take care,
>
It is, yes.
Regards,
Shlomi Fish
> -Adam
>
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Shlomi Fish http://www.shlomifish.org/
"The Human Hacking Field Guide" - http://xrl.us/bjn8q
The bad thing about hardware is that it sometimes works and sometimes doesn't.
The good thing about software is that it's consistent: it always does not
work, and it always does not work in exactly the same way.
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