Thus it was written in the epistle of Steve Fink,
> Bah. I will claim neither that being easy to learn is Perl's main goal,
> nor that I know what Perl's main goal is, but I have enough of an
> intuition (or did I misspell "opinion"?) to assert that ease of learning
> is a far more important _benchmark_ than, say, orthogonality or
> buzzword-compliance or computer sciency coolness.
Jawohl. Fully agreed.
> My standpoint is that Perl strives to be something that fits naturally
> in your head and allows you to write code that pertains directly to your
> problem, as opposed to spending a lot of time building abstractions and
> twiddling bits and types and worrying about the "cleanliness" of your
> code.
Yup.
> "Fitting naturally into your head" means borrowing from natural
> languages, creating shortcuts for common problems, and using a healthy
> dose of DWIMmery.
Yup.
> But the most direct way to measure how well the
> language slides into people's heads is by seeing how hard it is for them
> to get the hang of it.
Nope. I've yet to be convinced that "fits in your head" is the same as
"went in easily". Hang it all, English is hard to get at first--just ask my
seven-month-old (and my 4-year-old). But once in there, it's so blooming
useful.
It seems to me that we're arguing about multiple things here. We seem to all,
grudgingly at least, agree that $a, @a and %a when they are simple straight
forward things are useful. It appears that the big problems come in two
places. First, there's some confusion about the $,@,%. Programmers coming
from elsewhere think that they are part of the variable name and just specify
what type of variable it is, as in other languages. They need to be taught
rather that those things are context. That's a learning-curve issue and, I
contend, worth the learning.
The other big problem is that crazy @{} and $a->[] stuff and while I don't have
any particular solution, I agree that that is confusing and ugly. Even once I
got my brain around what it all means, it still looks downright ugly as far as
I'm concerned. Anyone have solutions to that?
Ted
--
Ted Ashton ([EMAIL PROTECTED]), Info Sys, Southern Adventist University
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[Asked for a testimony to the effect that Emmy Noether was a great woman
mathematician, he said:]
I can testify that she is a great mathematician, but that she is a woman, I
cannot swear.
-- Landau, E.
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Deep thoughts to be found at http://www.southern.edu/~ashted
