[Gllug] Perl Question - Spam Filter for NMS Form Mail

[James Laver]

On Fri, February 13, 2009 5:22 pm, Dave Cross wrote:
>
> Why would he change the record? I think he's spot on. The vast majority
> or Perl that the average developer or sysadmin comes across is
> badly-written, unmaintainable spaghetti.
>
> Yes, it doesn't absolutely need to be like that. And yes, Aaron, because
> you're closely involved with the Perl community you see a lot of
> well-written and maintainable code. You may even write it yourself. But
> that doesn't change the fact that most people's experience of Perl isn't
> like that.
>
> Yes, Tethys seems to have a knee-jerk "Perl is crap" reaction whenever
> the language is mentioned. But your knee-jerk reaction to his knee-jerk
> reaction is almost as annoying :-)
>
> No. He means that most Perl code out there is crap. Really. It's the
> truth. Look at the Perl code that most people who don't specialise in
> Perl will see - awstats, mrtg, majordomo, Matt's scripts. It's no wonder
> that people think that Perl is unreadable.
>
> And the answer isn't to keep telling people that they're wrong. They can
> see that they're not wrong and continually telling them that they are
> just makes them think that you're a liar.
>
> I love Perl. I'm most productive in Perl and I like to think that the
> Perl I leave behind me is better than most of the rubbish I am given to
> work on. But I don't pretend that the badly-written, unmaintainable Perl
> is a statistical outlier. I know that it's the norm and it's the Perl
> that you and I like to write that is abnormal.

All great, except that he's not saying most perl is crap, he's saying all
perl is crap and frankly that's bollocks.

Noone is going to argue there's a lot of crap perl out there much as noone
is going to argue there's a lot of crap php and python out there. Crap
perl just happens to look worse than crap python to the people who don't
program it particularly well.

I'm not buying what you're saying. Tet needs to quit whining about perl
being a crap language and instead needs to start whining about the
inability of people to learn to write decent code.

As it happens the worst PHP I've seen is on par with the worst perl system
I've ever seen. The only thing that pushed the perl system to win in
crapness was the database it was sat on. If you haven't heard of the
Edwinbase, it's legendary...

--James
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