[Gllug] OSS CMSs

[Richard Jones]

On Thu, Apr 28, 2005 at 10:15:55AM +0100, Doug Winter wrote:
> It's very hard to write good perl, and most people don't.

So much is true.

> The standard libraries (CPAN) are a nightmare.  The code is very
> difficult to read at the best of times, and is almost completely
> unmaintainable.

However, this is certainly not true.  CPAN represents a huge and
useful resource of well-thought out libraries for Perl.  I like it so
much, I wrote perl4caml so we can import CPAN libraries unchanged into
OCaml!

> It actively discourages object orientation,

A good thing.

> it encourages invisible side-effects and uses obscure punctuation to
> actively disguise what it's doing.

When you understand how Perl works, the "obscure" punctuation is fine.

> It converts between datatypes invisibly and with an almost cavalier
> disregard for good practice.  In fact, it seems to be a language
> that goes out of it's way to make it difficult to write reliable
> software.

Well, it's a dynamically typed language, so like all the other dynamic
languages we're talking about (Python, Ruby), it suffers in comparison
to the better statically typed languages with type inference (OCaml,
Haskell, SML).

Rich.

-- 
Richard Jones, CTO Merjis Ltd.
Merjis - web marketing and technology - http://merjis.com
Team Notepad - intranets and extranets for business - http://team-notepad.com
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