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

[David Damerell]

On Friday, 13 Feb 2009, Aaron Trevena wrote:
>2009/2/13 - Tethys <tethys at gmail.com>:
>>I appreciate it's only anecdotal evidence, but it's been true
>>in 100% of perl projects to which I've had personal exposure, and
>>there is plenty of supporting evidence to show that I'm not a
>>statistical outlier there, either. YMMV.
>You mean there is a small but noisy crowd of python/ruby fanboyz who
>agree with your personal grudge.

I don't think that's entirely fair (NB that Perl is the language I
know best, I find it indispensable for sysadmin stuff, and I wouldn't
hesitate to start a shared project in Perl).

Perl has the characteristic that there is more than one way to do it.
This, unfortunately, is a bit of a blight on shared projects. 

A hidden advantage of languages like C is that there is really only
one way that a competent C programmer will accomplish most tasks;
coding standards deal with boring stuff like indentation and variable
naming, and competent programmers can easily understand each others'
code once they overcome the urge to be excessively clever.

Conversely, a language like Perl that offers very many idioms is not
such a help here. When I look at a problem, I think "hash of arrays
here, subroutine references there". Someone else might well think
"objects!". If we work together, we don't necessarily understand each
other's work very easily, and the coding standards (perhaps only
informally understood) need to compel one of us to learn a new idiom
if we are to work together effectively.

>From that point of view languages like Python that have strong
opinions about how you should do things (in Python's case this is
usually "not the traditional Perl way" :-) offer an advantage for
shared projects.

-- 
David Damerell <damerell at chiark.greenend.org.uk> flcl?
Today is First Sunday, February - a weekend.
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