[mdlug] Another sed/regex question

[Michael Mikowski]

Hi Ray:

I could have sworn you called my child ugly! ;)

Seriously though, thanks for the detailed response.  I know you didn't mention Ruby, but there are plenty of others that have the view point that Ruby is maintainable.  Most of the Ruby I have seen is not, on many levels. 

In fact, most code I have seen is unmaintainable - regardless of the language. Developer discipline an adherence to code and documentation standards are more important to maintainability than language choice.  And there are off-the-shelf solutions for those, at least for Perl and JavaScript.

Cheers, Mike

Sent from my ASUS TF701T

-------- Original Message --------
From:"Ingles, Raymond" <Raymond.Ingles at dynatrace.com>
Sent:Tue, 07 Oct 2014 08:25:20 -0700
To:Michael Mikowski <z_mikowski at yahoo.com>
Subject:RE: [mdlug] Another sed/regex question

>> From: Michael Mikowski [mailto:z_mikowski at yahoo.com]
>> Subject: Re: [mdlug] Another sed/regex question
>
>> Blame it on the language, not the programmer eh?
>
>Don't get defensive, I didn't say your *child* was ugly! :-)
>
>Nor did I say that the language gets all the blame for unmaintainable code. A bad programmer can make terrible code in any language. But spaghetti code with GOTOs is hard to do in, say, PASCAL. Even in modern languages that allow GOTOs, there are enough structured alternatives that they tend not to happen by accident or laziness, but because they are actually needed.
>
>>  I had to manage Perl deployed to over 100 nodes in two Linux HP/HA clusters.  The code was quite well maintained and extended.
>
>Exactly - as I actually noted, you *can* certainly write maintainable code in Perl. But there are, in fact, the issues I noted - the language is so large that it's very easy for programmers to wind up coding to different subsets of the language, making interoperability and communication difficult. Same with C++.
>
>> Ruby rips off a large swath of Perl concepts and syntax, and has multiple was of obtaining many objectives.  Yet somehow ruby is maintainable...
>
>Um... did *I* say that? Where? I didn't use the word "Ruby" at all.
>
>> Do tell, what is a maintainable language?
>
>I tend to prefer C or Java, simply because the languages are usually small enough that you can figure out a code construction without having to go look it up in the documentation.
>
>> And if you answer Java, recognize you just named the language ecosystem with a vast amount of ritual and discipline baked into every possible step.
>
>Which does have some advantages, though it's not without disadvantages, namely:
>
>>  That's why prototyping in Java is so slow.  I prefer to apply discipline as I need it.
>
>Not all programmers recognize when that point has come, however. Ultimately it's the programmer's fault when things are hard to maintain, but sometimes the tools really do have an impact.
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