On Wed, 13 Mar 2002, Elaine -HFB- Ashton wrote: > Perl is easy to pick on because it's so often true that people have mounds > of crappy, ugly, shoddy, quickly slapped together perl code to point at. > I'm sure bioinformatics is a veritable treasure trove of such gems. > > This is endemic to the language so people either have to live with quickie > ugly perl that will render itself unmaintainable after a while or find > some way of defining standard coding practices for all projects including > perl.
I know Skud's been working on improving this, writing things like "perldoc perlmodstyle" (which is in bleadperl, I think)--- but the culture of Perl in general tends to encourage "I'll do it my way" sorts of uncooperative programming. TMTOWTDI is great until you have to maintain the code of someone whose way of doing things is utterly opaque or designed to be more clever than readable. IMO, Perl in the hands of a programmer who prioritizes readabile code isn't any worse than any other language. But yes, the language does provide lots and lots of rope. srl -- Shane R. Landrum [EMAIL PROTECTED] __o "In the end, you write the book that grabs you -\<, by the throat and demands to be written." - Salman Rushdie (*)/(*)
