On Sun, Mar 6, 2011 at 12:18 PM, Adam Morris
<adam.morris at redstargaming.net>wrote:

>
> On Mar 6, 2011, at 11:06 , Robert Nesius wrote:
>
> Anyway, take all of the above and Andy is saying "See.  You can get
> there."  And my point is "Look at everything you need to do to get there.
> While you can write atrocious code in Ruby or Python, it's not as easy to do
> as it is in Perl, and conversely it takes more effort in Perl to get to
> elegant, clean code."   That's really what it boils down to for me.
>
>
> See, that's where I disagree though.  I also write C/C++ and (*sob*) C#
> .NET code professionally and both of those require a fair bit of effort to
> keep them clean too.  At work, all of the C++ and C# code goes through Style
> Cop which performs the same functions that Perl Tidy and Perl Critic do.
>

Well - we can just stop there then, though I think referencing C/C++ and C#
is a bit of a strawman - those are statically typed languages, yeah?  They
come with their own baggage and thus weren't even a point of consideration
for me in the scope of this debate.  With that said you're right, all good
programming shops have style guides for whatever language they are working
in.


> Its easy to knock Perl because it has things like pointer dereferencing and
> those $, @, and % characters for types which vex newbies so much, but I
> think more blame lies on the programmer writing the code than the language
> itself.
>

No.... those symbols aren't optional.  The language says you have to use
them.

So really, my stance is why *wouldn't* you use Perl?  Its stable, it finally
> has releases coming out again, and most of all its mature.  Python and Ruby
> are almost as old as Perl and still aren't as close to being mature as Perl
> is.
>

I think you're mixing two issues together.  There's Perl, the language. CPAN
is separate from that.  Whenever I consider a programming project I consider
the language, and the availability of modules related to the task at hand.
Why wouldn't I use Perl?   I don't want to prefix every variable with a $ or
@ or % sign.  I hate the syntax around complicated data structures.  I like
strings that are objects.  Etc...   And really I'm just sick of Perl.

Indeed.  I don't believe it covers Moose though, and most OOP code you find
> these days uses that system.  Its still good to know however so you know how
> the native OOP stuff works in Perl.
>

I'm really not familiar with Moose.  I just spent some time looking over the
documents.  Definitely a nice step forward.  At the same time, it still
looks like perl.

I don't think you or I are going to change each other's mind, Andy, but
hopefully people enjoyed the debate.

-Rob
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