On Thu, 29 Mar 2001 06:53:49 +0200, Otto Wyss <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> > - Make readability your main objective. Readability is possibly the
> > weakest part of Perl.
> >
> > - Keep your eyes on modularity. Modularity is by far the best concept
> > where complexity could be hidden.
> >
> > - Don't forget usability. This is after all the point why people use
> > Perl in the first place.
> >
> It seems you are not interested in critics, so lets end this thread.
Au contraire. The Perl community is *very* much interested in critiques. Seen
the amount of response to you starting mail, this is overwhelming.
One thing you probably `missed' in this discussion, is the way /you/ look at
the language. Writing to the perl community, you're writing to people that got
used to the syntax and now see the logic and usability of the 'line noise' you
call unreadable.
Every language has got it's pros and cons. Perl's first usage for most of us is
probably it's glue function and versability. When you program/script in perl
for a few weeks/month/years, you'll get used to it, and you're going to like it
and probably even appreciate it.
I started using perl in my company after reading an article in Unix-Info (a
dutch magazine) that stated that perl would do well as an awk, grep and sed
replacement, and that rose my curiosity. All those utils on unix have their own
syntax, and you don't tell me that sed, awk and grep based scripts are
readable/maintainable, esp. if there's a lot of programmers involved in setting
up the lot.
Perl being a fine replacement for it, has now 'conquered' this company. We
almost never ever use shell scripts anymore, and there's not many left that
know how to write awk and sed scripts. One syntax will do.
In the beginning we wrote Perl scripts that called external SQL scripts, which
now are converted to DBI/DBD. Perl's glue function saves time. A reason to
postpone using DBD was that our database was not (yet) implemented by someone,
so I had to write it myself. Now the world has access to yet another Database
interface for perl through CPAN, yat another *BIG* advantage of the perl
community: they /share/ the knowledge.
If you want code that is readable by *all* your (even unexperienced)
programmers and want to keep it maintainable, feel free to use python, but if
you want to grow the program into more flexible use, extend it later to use yet
another database, interface or character encoding, I think you should hop over
the initial line noise and just *USE* perl.
If you do, I'd like to hear your experience half a year from now.
Have the appropriate amount of fun (in whatever language)!
--
H.Merijn Brand Amsterdam Perl Mongers (http://www.amsterdam.pm.org/)
using perl-5.005.03, 5.6.0, 5.6.1, 5.7.1 & 623 on HP-UX 10.20 & 11.00, AIX 4.2
AIX 4.3, WinNT 4, Win2K pro & WinCE 2.11 often with Tk800.022 &/| DBD-Unify
ftp://ftp.funet.fi/pub/languages/perl/CPAN/authors/id/H/HM/HMBRAND/
