[Gllug] Web Site Creation

[Nix]

On Thu, 3 Nov 2005, Aaron Trevena murmured woefully:
> On 11/3/05, Dani Pardo <dani at enplater.com> wrote:
>> En/na Aaron Trevena ha escrit:
>>   Usually this flame ends with saying that you can write horrible code
>> whatever language you use, and that there are no good/bad languages, but
>> good/bad programmers.

This is of course nonsense. Different languages have strengths and
weaknesses in different areas: there are languages with many strengths
and languages with many weaknesses. The trick is to find one that
has strengths in the areas you need them in and that don't shoot
you down with their weaknesses.

> There are some pretty awful languages about, luckily nobody tries to
> make you use them any more, and apart from that it is horses for
> courses.

Rubbish, unless you really believe that all languages are equally
expressive and that all languages yield similarly maintainable code with
the same amount of effort. If you really do think that it's pretty much
certain that you've not used many languages. I knew it was false after
I'd used two (and I think I was seven years old at the time; perhaps
six).

> The reason this reoccurs so frequently is that there is always
> somebody who doesn't understand how programming works in the real
> world or professional environment

Ah yes, that lovely logical fallacy. `If you don't understand that X
then you have Never Worked In The Real World', with the nicely
meaningless word `professional' thrown in for good measure.

The City of London is the real world, right? Sorry, I've been here for
eight years now: I'd say I do understand it. Generally it works by
throwing people at projects whose programming languages are set by
managerial fiat to something either buzzwordy or overconservative, and
in any case grossly unsuitable, applying insane deadlines so that there
is no time to ensure maintainability, and then rushing the result out of
the door as fast as possible.

If you're lucky they'll test it.

(Code reviews? Yeah, I've heard of them.)


(This sort of shit is one reason why the quality of so much proprietary
code is so terribly low.)

>                                   and has some particular kool-aide
> running through their blood stream - this years koolaide is ruby, last
> years was python but the python zealots haven't realised their time in
> the limelight is over and that they are no longer the cool kids on the
> block ;)

Perhaps those of us who like Python like it because of its
expressiveness and clarity, rather than because it's A Cool Language?
(I'll learn anything, `cool' or not, and then use the nicest. Simple
languages like Lisps have the notable extra advantage that you can
write your own interpreters for dialects of them really fast, so you
can sneak them into projects that are, by management fiat, written
in something grossly nonsuitable.)

>> The only point I don't really get nowadays, is talking about object
>> oriented Perl.. Perl is an scripting language (wich I really enjoy btw),
>> and trying to fit it in a OO model is somehow going agains its nature.. no?
> 
> OO was retrofitted to Perl in version 5, it provides some backwards
> compatibility to perl 4, and is rather unique in it's unprecedented
> flexibility and lack of constraints -

I find it rather annoying; the hoops one must jump through to implement
simple things like private instance variables are insane (even if most
of those hoops can now be automated away by CPAN modules, they're still
there). It's usable, but it's a hell of a lot less usable and flexible
than Python's implementation of the same. (Look up `new-style classes':
Perl won't get anything like *that* until Perl 6.)

> OO Perl these days uses the standard CPAN modules for persistance,
> generating accessors and the other tedious work so we can have our
> cake and eat it.

And that's why I can tolerate OO in Perl. I still think it's horrible.

> The only things it makes hard are MMD and overloading, but they aren't
> a major concern for most general programming tasks.

Actually, overloading/polymorphism are utterly critical for anything
remotely resembling OO, adn Perl supports them perfectly well (although
as usual it does so in a horrible crocky fashion liable to induce
projectile vomiting).

-- 
`Heinlein is quite competent at putting together sentences, but usually
he also puts together a plot to go with them.' --- Russ Allbery
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