[Gllug] C/C++ mentor

[Daniel P. Berrange]

On Tue, Nov 28, 2006 at 06:50:26PM +0000, Jason Clifford wrote:
> On Tue, 28 Nov 2006, TreeBoy wrote:
> 
> > Finally: I'm afraid that I am one of Those People (tm) that just have never 
> > got to grips with Perl. I consider it a Write-Once-Throw-Away language simply 
> > because of the number of times that I have met code that I find completely 
> > unintelligible. I have written and seen obfuscated code in C, C++, Fortran, 
> > Modula2, various Basics, PHP, Logo, Lisp, 6502 Assembler, 6800 Assembler, x86 
> > Assembler, VAX Assembler, HP-UX assembler.... But Perl seems to require it!
> 
> Well formed code in perl is simply a function of a decent programmer. If 
> the code is hard to read that's just a matter of the way the author 
> approached the problem (s)he was solving.

Its exacerbated by the fact that the reason people commonly turn to using 
Perl is because they *need* to do a very quick solution & thus don't have
the time to apply normal software engineering practices. They're basically
taking a concious decision to do write-once-read-never code because that's
the minimal effort to get the immediate job done. Business folks shouting
at them don't care about the long term cost - just want the shortterm win!

> The thing with perl is that even poorly written code will do what the 
> author wants so long as the code gives the right instructions.
> 
> It is however very easy to write very readable code in perl.

Yes, I've worked on several long term projects which used Perl and were
just as maintainable as equivalent projects written in Java / C / C++,
if not more so.

> As in every case of such an arguement it's horses for courses but everyone 
> who disagrees with me is wrong :)


Dna.
-- 
|=-            GPG key: http://www.berrange.com/~dan/gpgkey.txt       -=|
|=-       Perl modules: http://search.cpan.org/~danberr/              -=|
|=-           Projects: http://freshmeat.net/~danielpb/               -=|
|=-   berrange at redhat.com  -  Daniel Berrange  -  dan at berrange.com    -=|
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: signature.asc
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 196 bytes
Desc: Digital signature
URL: <http://mailman.lug.org.uk/pipermail/gllug/attachments/20061128/7b247877/attachment.pgp>
-------------- next part --------------
-- 
Gllug mailing list  -  Gllug at gllug.org.uk
http://lists.gllug.org.uk/mailman/listinfo/gllug