[Gllug] C/C++ mentor

[Aaron Trevena]

On 28/11/06, Pete Ryland <pdr at pdr.cx> wrote:
> On 28/11/06, TreeBoy <gllug at petethetree.co.uk> wrote:
> > Inevitably, you find some code in an office environment that was a quick hack
> > to solve an immediate problem and so was not designed for maintainability.
>
> IMO, it's not just that.  The problem I see is that there are too many
> ways to do things in perl.  Different people use different subsets of
> the language, meaning that to maintain any arbitrary perl code, you
> need to grok *everything* the language has to offer, which is a very
> large amount.  C++ suffers from this as well IMO, although there is a
> bit less to learn.

You don't need to grok everything the language has to offer at all.
I've been doing Perl professionally for both small and large projects,
everything from quick cgi scripts and one liners, to CRM, Supply Chain
Management and Aviation. No more than twice, since I was a newbie,
have I come accross some Perl in my work that was outside of what I
already I was familiar with, and I'm no Perl Guru, I've never needed
to touch XS/SWIG, internals, B::, are more than 10% of the debugger.

In fact, it's well known that you only need to know a small subset to
get a job done, that's why sysadmins use it, cgi newbies used it back
in 1995, etc. You don't even have to know about compilers, VMs or OO
as you do with Java, C# and C++.

People don't use different subsets of the language, the only
difference is between newbies (C or BASIC style idioms, simplest
syntax), badly taught newbies (Graduates of Solena Sol and Matt
Wright, who use the same syntax as newbies, but basically writing perl
4 as if CPAN didn't exist), and the rest of us.

That's no different to Java or PHP newbies who read bad books, and
code 1995 style Java as if it was VB, or PHP as if it was 1993 SSI.

C++, Java and C#  all have a LOT more to learn, just compare a
helloworld program at the start of any book on the subject, and don't
get me started on the horrors in C++ like the STL. *shudder*.

regards,

Aaron

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