On the future of Perl 5 [LWN.net]

On the future of Perl 5

Posted Dec 7, 2008 0:06 UTC (Sun) by rwmj (subscriber, #5474)
In reply to: On the future of Perl 5 by kragil
Parent article: On the future of Perl 5

Perl5 is a hideous write once language

Sorry, but you are talking utter nonsense. I have worked in a commercial Perl environment with 10 people contributing to a large Perl codebase (>250,000 LOC) and there was no problem understanding other people's code. There are many reasons not to like Perl, but your unfamiliarity with reading Perl is not one of them.

Rich.

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On the future of Perl 5

Posted Dec 7, 2008 0:16 UTC (Sun) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]

By that argument, C is a horrible write-once language: I've seen appalling
unreadable spaghetti filled with longjmps and free casting between
pointers and integers before (and had to maintain it, generally by
rewrite).

What I think can be fairly said is that Perl, when exposed to programmers
who read absolutely minimal docs and mostly work by cargo-culting, is
particularly amenable to having those programmers turn out unreadable
crap. (I very much wish that such programmers didn't exist: however, in my
entire working life I have worked with perhaps two people who did *not*
fall into that classification. So they are regrettably common.)

On the future of Perl 5

Posted Dec 7, 2008 19:45 UTC (Sun) by chromatic (guest, #26207) [Link]

Perl, when exposed to programmers who read absolutely minimal docs and mostly work by cargo-culting, is particularly amenable to having those programmers turn out unreadable crap.

That's certainly true. Yet it's also true that a lot of that unreadable, unmaintainable code gets stuff done. The barrier to entry is exceedingly low, while the barrier to maintainable code is about as high as for any language.