On Tue, Mar 27, 2001 at 11:33:18PM +0200, Otto Wyss wrote:
> Could you imaging being the leader of a 10 people project where
> everybody design and codes in their own unique manner?
No, which is why in *those* situations, you have house rules. I don't
think Perl stops you doing that. It just doesn't enforce them; project
managers do that. :)
>
> > 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
> >
> In other words it's the english speaking children's own fault if they have
> more reading problems than others?
I'm not sure how that follows from what I said. All languages have the
potential to be used to compose both beautiful and ugly utterances.
> It's is not proven but I suspect even russian speaking children have much
> less problems than english. I wouldn't be surprised if this holds for
> Japanese as well.
Yes, true. But until people speak any computer programming languages as
a first language, this is completely irrelevant to the discussion in hand.
> > 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
> >
> I've never said German (or Italian) is the better language than English.
I never said you said that.
> IMHO Perl lacks readability
OK, before this *completely* heads into the direction of advocacy, which
it's dangerous close to anyway, you need to qualify that.
Are you saying that the Perl code that *I* write lacks readability? I don't
think so; I think I write readable code. Do you see the problem? PEOPLE use
the language in different ways. Some use it well, some don't.
You're saying that a language "lacks readability", but firstly, you're not
actually qualifying that in any way. You're not giving any examples of what
you mean, and this means we can't make it better. Secondly, "Perl" isn't
unreadable. I don't think it even makes sense to say that a language is
unreadable. A language generally consists of a grammar, (which is generally
not written down) an alphabet, (individual symbols of which might be pretty
aesthetically unpleasing, but that's by the by) and some semantic content
which isn't written down either. There's nothing "unreadable" about English
and there's nothing unreadable about Perl. There's certainly things unreadable
(to me at least, because I'm not used to it) about John Milton, and there's
certainly things unreadable about Abigail's JAPHs. (to you at least, because
you're not used to it.) But Milton isn't the English language any more than a
JAPH is the Perl language.
Anyway, I'm setting follow-ups to perl-advocacy to try and get this out of
here. If you have any positive, practical, real suggestions as to what you
think is unreadable *and* how to improve it, feel free to send it back to
perl6-language. At present, though, this doesn't belong here.
--
About the use of language: it is impossible to sharpen a pencil with a blunt
ax. It is equally vain to try to do it with ten blunt axes instead.
-- Edsger Dijkstra
