[ILUG-Social] Perl is a pool language

[Niall O Broin]

On Wed, Oct 11, 2000 at 06:22:56PM +0100, Joe Desbonnet wrote:

> Perl is a poor choice of language for all but the smallest projects IMHO.
> Good for small write-only scripts. Poor for application development. (I know
> because I've used it for this type of stuff).  

Given your current place of employment, Joe (unless you've moved recently)
does that mean that you'd regard TCL as a better language for application
development ? The badness of Perl for big projects has been debated ad
nauseum and the bottom line is that you can write un-readable code in Perl
if you like, but equally you can write un-readable code in many other
languages too - have a look at this, as mentioned earlier today on the main
ILUG list

#include <stdio.h>

int main ()
{
  int element = 8, array[10];
  array[element] = 123;
  printf("Element %d is %d - or is that %d\n", 
  element, array[element], element[array]);
  exit (0);
}

This code snippet compiles and runs correctly. However, if you write code
like that in a large project you deserve all the brain-pain you get.
Similarly, you can write dreadfully obfuscated Perl, but on your own head be
it. It must be said that some of the supposedly obfuscated features of Perl
are what allows it to be a very expressive language, so if you want to
maintain a Perl project, you should have Perl programmers.

After all, if you wanted to enforce reabability, you should probably make
coding in Cobol compulsory.



Regards,



Niall