121–130 of 131 posts
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A karma 3 account. Where are the Perl-hating trolls coming from on HN? (I thought Guido said that it was time to stop trolling, so it isn't Python people now?)
I am puzzled why your immediate response is to blame Python.
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Good question. I found others i had to share code with weren't as interested as me about writing maintainable perl code - i got really fed up with a patch work of "write only" perl scripts performing useful functions in prod. From DB maintenance tasks to general housekeeping, to work-arounds for prod app issues that never got prioritised for strategic fixes. I found in practice python code produced by most others was…
* ... it seemed to more or less force people to write more readable and therefore, maintainable code.* What do you mean by "readable" and how does Python seem to enforce that?
This is great - you can cook something up in 5 lines that would take 15+ in Python and 50+ in C++. It also means that it's really tempting for some to abuse this ability, even for code which will be long lived.
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Good question. I found others i had to share code with weren't as interested as me about writing maintainable perl code - i got really fed up with a patch work of "write only" perl scripts performing useful functions in prod. From DB maintenance tasks to general housekeeping, to work-arounds for prod app issues that never got prioritised for strategic fixes. I found in practice python code produced by most others was…
I am somehow surprised that people consider merely forcing indentation on bad programmers makes them good programmers.
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I was going to downvote your comment, but then I clicked through and read the linked question and commentary.
I don't get what the issue is, I don't even know Perl and it seems pretty straightforward to me: Carp is a library with a set of mnemonic assertion functions for libraries to signal usage errors committed by their callers. Do people just prefer one function with a bunch of fiddly little enums or something?
I've found over the past decade or so that when I write a "perl" program I'm really writing about five lines of glue code around multiple CPAN packages. Well maybe more than 5 lines for control flow, some business-logic error handling, etc. When I write in another language I spend a long time looking for a library like the ten I'd find in CPAN, sometimes I find one but often enough not, then a long time complaining a…
> a "perl" program Why is perl in quotes here?
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Considering perl5 is only 18 years old then somethings gone very awry there :) Perl6 is looking quite fresh considering how old you think it is. I just submitted an article I'd seen to HN which shows how a formula like... 4.7kΩ ± 5% ... can be parsed inline with Perl6 code. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4939204
I was just joking :) It's interesting to me how often people cite "Unicode in code" as some sort of amazing thing. I once posted on S.O. about the idea that maybe we should have a programming language where the vast array of options in Unicode were exploited to make things like Regular Expressions more readable (avoiding the backslash plague alone would be worth it). I got smacked down by people complaining that they…
re: Unicode - Perl6 does already use unicode characters for some of its operators. Take the Hyperoperator »« (http://perlcabal.org/syn/S03.html#Hyper_operators):
my @a = 1..5;
my @b = 6..10;
my @c = @a »*« @b; # => 6, 14, 24, 36, 50
@c>>++; # => 7, 15, 25, 37, 5Work stuff is mostly Ruby, Python and PHP. Entertainment is Clojure (mmmmm.... Lispy goodness) and Haskell ATM. But for my own stuff I still reach for Perl. Best testing infrastructure on the planet and that, in combination with CPAN, lets me get shit done.
I interviewed you once ... approximately forever ago ... and you told me at the time you were just switching to using Ruby for fun stuff, while using Perl for work. I'm glad you switched back, and appreciate your excellent CPAN modules!
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* ... it seemed to more or less force people to write more readable and therefore, maintainable code.* What do you mean by "readable" and how does Python seem to enforce that?
So one of perl's nicest features is it just plain, flat gets out of your way. If you want to write something some way, go ahead, perl will allow you. This is great - you can cook something up in 5 lines that would take 15+ in Python and 50+ in C++. It also means that it's really tempting for some to abuse this ability, even for code which will be long lived.
I don't believe Python is that inflexible (it's not), and I don't see how the limited and superficial ways in which Python pushes all code to look the same are really that meaningful.