Christopher Schultz wrote:
> Oh, sorry.
As you certainly surmised, I wasn't being serious, and was in fact
fishing for some reaction.
Perl is a "write-only" language
(meaning that nobody can ever read a perl script after the fact).
I like that one.
Let me offer another one, popular in perl geek circles :
A bad programmer can write assembly-language programs in any language.
(Although the audience for that one is more limited these days, when
most active programmers probably never saw an assembly-language program
in their professional life).
That's the most frequent reproach addressed to perl, but it does not
have to be that way, and it is most frequently made by people who do not
know their perl from their haskell, and are easily confused and thrown
into convulsions by the mere appearence of a $scalar, an @array or a %hash.
But for instance the following kind of snippet, while undoubtedly
looking simple and elegant to any confirmed Java servlet programmer, in
the eyes of this beholder is not any better :
this.writer = new PrintWriter( new OutputStreamWriter( new
CapturedServletOutputStream( new ByteArrayOutputStream())));
Admittedly, it doesn't contain and cryptic sign, but it merely displaces
the problem : the Java part of it is minimal and easy; but for someone
like me, it means going to dig into at least 25 pages of Javadocs to
figure out what these things do, what kind of parameters they take, and
how they relate to eachother. And I omitted the try/catch block around
it to save space.
In the eyes of the beholder, thus..
Basically, being a Java programmer is not a matter of learning the Java
language; that part is easy. But it's a matter of knowing your classes,
and that to me takes an incredible amount of time before you can start
being productive. I have the impression that one can only become really
proficient in one particular area of the class hierarchy, so long is the
ramp-up period. That's a serious comment by the way, and I am curious
to know if a proficient Java programmer feels that way too.
I'm working in a very small company, doing a lot of different things to
satisfy a wide range of customers. So I tend to flit from one area to
the other, without really ever having the chance (not admittedly the
desire) to become really an expert at any of them. That's why perl
suits me fine, because it covers a lot of areas without requiring years
of study.
I have to admit
that I hate the addition of objects to Perl.
Yeah, but perl OO is fun just /because/ you can poke holes in it.
You are never forced to use it. Many CPAN modules even provide both an
OO and a non-OO interface, so again you can use the one or the other
according to what's expedient for the current task.
Yeah... nobody ever got into trouble writing a Java webapp :)
I must admit there's truth to that. Despite my abysmal Java and Tomcat
knowledge, I haven't managed to really take down a Tomcat yet. Except
with system.exit(), but that's cheating (and can be prevented, as
pointed out earlier) (ok, you can probably manage to trigger the OOM
gnome). With mod_perl, it's easier to take down an Apache child or the
whole thing.
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