On the future of Perl 5 [LWN.net]

On the future of Perl 5

Posted Dec 7, 2008 0:16 UTC (Sun) by nix (subscriber, #2304)
In reply to: On the future of Perl 5 by rwmj
Parent article: On the future of Perl 5

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.)

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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.