Robert Mathews <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:
> ... and don't know use English. Why can't they learn to use it?
Why can't the new users of Perl learn the real variable names?
I guess I don't buy the argument that the real names are harder to learn.
Most of them have fairly useful mnemonics, you see them and use them
constantly so they become familiar quickly, and most Perl code out there
uses them.
> Are you saying that nothing is worth knowing unless the oldsters know it
> already?
\begin{rant}
No, I was not saying that. I was saying exactly what I said. I meant
what I said. If I'd meant something else, I would have said that instead.
\end{rant}
> It's not that I want to jam English down everyone's throats. But Nate
> asked, "does anyone want this," and I said, "yes." Or at least, I would
> want it if it worked.
Hey, I'm not claiming you're trying to jam anything anywhere. We were
discussing use English, and I'm expressing my opinion just like you are.
I've found the use of use English in code I had to maintain to be annoying
and unhelpful, and to actually degrade the maintainability of the code, so
I threw in my two cents.
> You'd learn to recognize the long variable names if you used English
> regularly. It's a chicken-and-egg problem, but not a very difficult
> one.
I've yet to understand why I'd *want* to use English regularly; so far as
I can tell, it has essentially no benefit in the long term. Perl is not
now, nor is it likely to ever be, a language that's particularly readable
by people who don't know Perl, and use English in order to learn the
strange names used by use English strikes me as rather circular. Either
the person maintaining the code learns Perl, in which case the use English
names won't be necessary, or they don't, in which case they're unlikely to
be able to maintain the code anyway.
I know it's not the only stance to take, but I prefer to try to make my
Perl code very readable by people who know Perl, and encourage people who
don't know Perl who are trying to read my code to learn Perl first, or at
the same time. There are certainly languages out there that are more
readable for people who don't know the language at all than Perl is, but I
don't find this a particularly important feature in a language. In those
cases where it is, I'd use a language other than Perl.
use English doesn't really address the syntactical points of Perl that
make it hard to read for someone who doesn't know Perl; it strikes me, and
always has struck me, as a bad partial solution to a problem that may not
need to be solved and that only makes things more complicated in the long
run.
--
Russ Allbery ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>
