The irony is that the readability of 93% of actual Perl code is equivalent to the paint splatters
93% of Paint Splatters Are Valid Perl Programs
51–60 of 135 posts
Re: 93% of Paint Splatters Are Valid Perl Programs
#52Earlier quoted context omitted.
Perl gives you as much rope as you want to hang yourself. If you can develop a style, and try to avoid being too clever, it can be just as readable as any other language.
The best languages sacrifice readability the least for a given amount of cleverness.
Exactly. Like BASIC.
Re: 93% of Paint Splatters Are Valid Perl Programs
#53Earlier quoted context omitted.
The best languages sacrifice readability the least for a given amount of cleverness.
Exactly. Like BASIC.
I'd argue that use of clever or advanced patterns in BASIC actually renders the code rather opaque. I.e. compare coroutine usage between BASIC and ruby (if you're even able to get it working in BASIC).
Re: 93% of Paint Splatters Are Valid Perl Programs
#54Earlier quoted context omitted.
Perl gives you as much rope as you want to hang yourself. If you can develop a style, and try to avoid being too clever, it can be just as readable as any other language.
The best languages sacrifice readability the least for a given amount of cleverness.
Or the best give you all the flexibility you could ever need and allow you the freedom to write readable and maintainable code or use all the features to write an insanely terse oneliner that can do the job quickly and be thrown out.
Re: 93% of Paint Splatters Are Valid Perl Programs
#55Not surprising, I often felt you could roll your face across the keyboard and it'd be a valid perl program.
Re: 93% of Paint Splatters Are Valid Perl Programs
#56Because of the frequency I see undecipherable strings like this in actual Perl code, I don't like Perl the programming language. However, I love Perl the project. Take a look at the config file for Perl and how many systems and architectures it accommodates: https://github.com/Perl/perl5/blob/blead/Configure It's clearly such an incredible labor of love by Larry Wall et al. that I'm sad for them it isn't more popular…
While some people tend to say Perl was chosen by the young bioinformatics community because of it's excel in text processing, I think Perl was just the go-to scripting language in the late 90s. In my field (numerical relativity), Perl was also the go-to language in the early days. People then moved on to Python because of the numpy/scipy ecosystem which allowed to combine Perl-like scripts with Matlab/Fortran like post processing. Today, everything is Python. Python2 :-P
Re: 93% of Paint Splatters Are Valid Perl Programs
#57Still my favorite language.
This has, in fact, reinforced my sincere belief that Perl is God's chosen language.
Re: 93% of Paint Splatters Are Valid Perl Programs
#58I miss Perl. Why did PHP win again, in the late 90s? (though I'm mostly Python these days and shan't complain, there was a good 10 year stretch of PHP there I'm not proud of).
PHP won because it was easy to install and restrict (by memory usage) on shared servers, as well as the fact that writing a PHP script was as simple as renaming an .html file to .php so web designers who wanted some dynamic functionality could use it really easily. As bad as some aspects of PHP were, making it so trivial to install and make available on a server was a brilliant move that lots of languages could still…
Interesting. Similar to how typescript can be added with a rename from foo.js to foo.ts.
Re: 93% of Paint Splatters Are Valid Perl Programs
#59I miss Perl. Why did PHP win again, in the late 90s? (though I'm mostly Python these days and shan't complain, there was a good 10 year stretch of PHP there I'm not proud of).
mod_php was much simpler to use than mod_perl; and much more amenable to shared hosting
Re: 93% of Paint Splatters Are Valid Perl Programs
#60I recently wrote a little program that will create a Markov Chain from on our perl codebase, generate a few sentences and check against `perl -c`. It takes less than 10 attempts to generate a bunch of lines of [very funny] valid Perl code.