> 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
The side effect of flexible op behaviour and some ambiguity in syntax is
the ability to write how you want to write. The interesting part is that
well-written ("readable") Perl would be considered by a non-programmer to
be much more intelligible than, say, what a programmer would call
"readable" C, since they can actually deduct the function without
understanding the language. ("You mean I can write, 'print values %hash',
and it will work?") You *can* write programs in Perl which are
significantly more readable than their equivalents in other languages,
because of this behaviour.
When programmers say "readable", they usually mean to say "statically
consistent", preferring a language with no contextually-conditional
behaviour. The result is an inability to write code that *is*
unreadable, syntax that is not idiomatic, blah blah blah. The result isn't
Perl, or Perl 6.
As for the English influence, you're welcome to identify ways that the
syntax could be extended or tightened to be less so. That's the intent of
the mailing list. But please, no more Latin ... I like positional
dependency. :)
