Brandon Mitchell wrote:
On 4/19/06, Brian Chrisman <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
I'm putting that in the 'unlearned criticism file':
Based upon that statement alone, I would have to relegate the remainder to same.
An opinion made obvious by snipping my points rather than responding to
them.. :-)
You are certainly welcome to claim that I am uninformed, but I'm not
claiming that I have 'only ever known enough to lisp to have debugged
someone else's code'.
lisp was my first language, and I missed its functionality very much
when I had to program in only C...
But perl is still my text-processing, ancient-flat-file-importing,
sweetheart.
Input file-o-crap, output sweet milky goodness.. :)
If yer handed a data dump from a 70's era mainframe, or a flat text file
from another old database (dbase, pick, whatever), you are going to want
perl.
In 1996, I would have said I wanted awk or lisp (assuming you are
referring to perl's text-parsing abilities). Now, I would say I wanted
ruby or python or awk or lisp. Perhaps *you* would want perl, to the
disdain of the poor souls tasked with polishing that turd long after
you have come and gone.
c'mon.. you haven't seen my perl... it's damn sexy.. :-)
I think part of the misunderstanding here is that perl is not designed
to be the best language out there for any apparent task, but rather the
language that is most familiar and easy to adopt by most people in
industry.
I'll just return the favor of snippage here.. :-)
Erik is referring to perl's inherent promotion of the 'easy' or
'hackish' way out of a given problem domain, without consideration for
the existence of a correct, canonical solution that would (as Erik
asserts) be easier to implement and maintain.
There are many pragmatic cases where 'throw away' or 'limited
maintainability' code is perfectly acceptable too. In those cases, I
have been known to write hacky perl to do this. I highly doubt an
alternative in lisp is much easier to implement, even with the proper
infrastructure. As for maintainability, I've got perl/php scripts that
are just a few pages long which are quite maintainable.
I'm not saying you can't do it better these days, but if you do, you are
probably using some ideas which were formulated originally in perl...
thus, it's been a useful language, and not some pariah of programmer
corruption.
One can make the claim that I'm stupid for this, but that'll be
difficult to prove definitively... :-)
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