On Wed Oct 15, 2008 at 20:13:31 +0100, Stephen Rowles wrote: > As a replacement for something like bash, I think perl is a great thing.
Agreed. > However for applications I hate perl! It is far to easy to write perl code > that is impossible to read, and some of those magic perl tricks can make > it even worse! There are so many nasty horrible things you can do with > perl, and far to many people use them ;) (usually all of them at once if > they possibly can!) Every time I hear this complaint I think of myself. I say exactly the same thing about the majority of PHP code I touch - but that is probably because I'm cleaning up security holes. Honestly I don't understand why Perl has this reputation. It is possible to do clever "tricks" in any environment interesting enough to be useful. Similarly a bad coder will be a bad coder regardless of implementation language. I could give examples of bad PHP, bad C, bad C++, and many more without too much effort. Similarly things that are tricks to some people are idiomatic expressions to others. (e.g. the first time a saw Duff's Device in C, or the temp-free XOR swap trick in C.) > I think perl is a good tool, just often mis-used for things where it > really isn't the best tool for the job. I think junior developers are good, but often mis-used for applications which later become important .. Steve -- http://www.steve.org.uk/ -- Please post to: Hampshire@mailman.lug.org.uk Web Interface: https://mailman.lug.org.uk/mailman/listinfo/hampshire LUG URL: http://www.hantslug.org.uk --------------------------------------------------------------
