On Sun, 13 Oct 2013 09:37:58 +1100, Chris Angelico wrote:
> This is design. Python has a king (Guido). It wasn't built by a
> committee. Maybe you won't like some aspect of Python's design, but it
> has one, it's not just sloppily slapped together.
While I agree with your general thrust, I don't think it's quite so
simple. Perl has a king, Larry Wall, but his design is more or less
"throw everything into the pot, it'll be fine" and consequently Perl is,
well, *weird*, with some pretty poor^W strange design decisions.
- Subroutines don't have signatures, you have to parse arguments
yourself by popping values off the magic variable @_ .
- More special variables than you can shake a stick at: @_ $_ $a $b @ARGV
$& ${^ENCODING} $. $| $= $$ $^O $^S @F and many, many more.
- Context sensitivity: these two lines do very different things:
$foo = @bar
@foo = @bar
and so do these two:
my($foo) = `bar`
my $foo = `bar`
- Sigils. Sigils everywhere.
- Separate namespaces for scalars, arrays, hashes, filehandles,
and subroutines (did I miss anything?), co-existing in the same
scope, all the better for writing code like this:
$bar = &foo($foo, $foo[1], $foo{1})
If you think that all three references to $foo refer to the same
variable, you would be wrong.
- Two scoping systems (dynamic and lexical) which don't cooperate.
- Strangers to Perl might think that the way to create a local variable
is to define it as local:
local $foo;
but you'd be wrong. "local" does something completely different. To
create a local variable, use "my $foo" instead.
More here: http://perl.plover.com/FAQs/Namespaces.html
Likewise Rasmus Lerdorf, king of PHP (at least initially), but he had no
idea what he was doing:
"I had no intention of writing a language. I didn't have a clue how to
write a language. I didn't want to write a language," Lerdorf explained.
"I just wanted to solve a problem of churning out Web applications very,
very fast."
http://www.devshed.com/c/a/PHP/PHP-Creator-Didnt-Set-Out-to-Create-a-Language/
--
Steven
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