[mdlug] Forget Perl, I'm switching to LOLCODE!

[Mark Montague]

On Thu, Sep 6, 2007 22:24, Aaron Kulkis <akulkis3 at HotPOP.com> wrote:
> Wolfger wrote:
>   
>>> Perl has, unfortunately, become the modern PL/1, partially because
>>> there is such an overlap of features and methods that there are
>>> many many many MANY ways of doing the same routine task.
>>>       
>> Yeah... We all know how unusable English is, with all those different
>> ways of saying the same thing. How can anybody read a novel?
>>     
>
> A novel is readable.  A lot of valid perl code isn't, just
> like a lot of valid PL/1 code is likewise unreadable.
>   

I'd submit that this is a problem with the programmer, not with the 
language.  I've seen Pascal programs that are extremely difficult to 
read and understand -- yet Pascal is a language meant to encourage good 
programming practices.

To continue the analogy (I really like Wofger's points in his previous 
message), I've seen plenty of English novels, that, despite being 
perfectly valid English, were extremely difficult to read -- by this, I 
mean that it was very hard to figure out what the author meant to say, 
and the novels required a real effort to slog through, taking all of the 
joy out of reading for me.  "Atlas Shrugged" and "Ulysses" come to mind 
here.

In other words, just like with any other language, it is possible to 
write Perl that is easy to read and Perl that is hard to read.  What I 
like about Perl is that it does not try to constrain skilled programmer 
in a futile attempt to make the programs of non-skilled programmers 
better:  Perl gets out of my way and lets me get the job done.  If my 
code is not readable, or is not pretty, or is an inefficient squinky 
hack, then I have no one to blame but myself.

                Mark Montague
                markmont at umich.edu


-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://mdlug.org/pipermail/mdlug/attachments/20070907/b608c85e/attachment-0001.html>
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: smime.p7s
Type: application/x-pkcs7-signature
Size: 4502 bytes
Desc: S/MIME Cryptographic Signature
URL: <http://mdlug.org/pipermail/mdlug/attachments/20070907/b608c85e/attachment-0001.bin>