Please CC Otto in all replies concerning this topic. I want to make sure he
reads how wrong he is about Perl and its readability and I think Simon sums it
up perfectly here.
I also want to add that all of those strange looking symbols make Perl the
powerful language it is. I love the freedom Perl gives me to express my
algorithms in my own unique, and hopefully efficient, manner. TMTOWTDI baby!
Without that Perl motto I would be using Python right now (I am not slamming
Python btw) because its author wanted specifically to limit the multitude of
ways you can solve a problem through the syntax and that doesn't work for
everyone. Simon nailed down the whole thing by simply stating that programmers
make Perl unreadable (some of us take pride in it as well) not Perl itself. My
main concern with Perl6 is the exact opposite of Otto's, I do not want to see
all the TMTOWTDI elements disappear from Perl. I want all the symbols to
remain. I want the regex to stay as powerful as it is now and I want the
ability to write my Perl with the amount of readability that is necessary for
the task at hand. Simon also got an Amen from me when he asked why some people
want programming languages to look more like human languages anyway. I do not
want to write a novel, so to speak, every time I need a quick and powerful
program written in Perl. I want, after learning the language well (hint, hint),
the ability to write a few lines of crazy symbols using Perl and have it perform
the task expected and wow my boss with the speed in which I wrote a great and
accurate program.
I did not move to Perl because it had the simplest syntax (that wasn't what I
was looking for anyway) and I personally feel that shouldn't be your main
motivation in choosing a language to begin with. I moved to Perl because it
allowed me to create extremely powerful, portable, and flexible programs faster
than any other language I have currently ever used. Just learn it well, Otto,
and you'll soon appreciate and love Perl's rich syntax.
To all you great programmers working on Perl6, don't make it Pascal (and I know
you won't) make it the better TMTOWTDI Perl I know it can be. Thanks for
listening to my rant.
A Perl advocate and user for life,
Brandon
-----Original Message-----
From: Simon Cozens [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]]
Sent: Monday, March 26, 2001 10:03 AM
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Subject: Re: Perl culture, perl readabillity
On Fri, Mar 23, 2001 at 11:34:41PM +0100, Otto Wyss wrote:
> - Make readability your main objective. Readability is possibly the
> weakest part of Perl.
There's nothing fundamentally about Perl that makes it unreadable. Seriously.
Perl doesn't write unreadable Perl, people do. You can write some beautifully
readable programs in Perl. You can write some horrible programs in Perl too.
Try it. Take an algorithm and write it in as many ways as you can. Try and
make it as ugly or as beautiful as possible - the fact is, you *can* choose
how readable you want it to be.b
Oh, sure. So it has funny symbols. But it's a different language![1] It's just
like reading things written in Cyrillic. That's unreadable if you don't
know any Cyrillic. Well, duh. Once you know the alphabet, it's as clear as
day.
Or shorthand. Think about shorthand - that can look pretty unreadable. But
when you realise that it *is* shorthand and you shouldn't try and read it like
an ordinary text, it's fine. Regular expression syntax is shorthand.
/^.(\d{3})$/ might look daunting to someone who doesn't know the shorthand,
but it's perfectly readable to anyone who does. And to anyone who does,
writing it out longhand seems horrific:
$string->match->beginning->capture("digit", "digit", "digit")->end;
Much of Perl is the same, even though it *does* have considerably more
natural-languagey features than many other languages. Take phrase
construction, for instance. How many other languages let you say "X if Y" as
less as "if Y, X"?
In short, no. Readability isn't the weakest part of Perl; it's the weakest
part of Perl programmers. "You can write FORTRAN in any language". Because
Perl gives people a means to express their thoughts in a manner more compact
than their ordinary natural language, they do.
Oh, and you think Perl is more English than German? Here's someone who doesn't
think so:
``Perl is the successfull attempt to make a braindump directly executable.''
- Lutz Donnerhacke in de.org.ccc
[1] Why do people want programming languages to look like human languages
anyway? We use them for such completely different problem domains...
--
> I'm a person, not a piece of property.
Happily, I'm both!
- Lionel and Stephen Harris.
