this post was submitted on 30 Sep 2023
61 points (85.1% liked)
Programming
17496 readers
41 users here now
Welcome to the main community in programming.dev! Feel free to post anything relating to programming here!
Cross posting is strongly encouraged in the instance. If you feel your post or another person's post makes sense in another community cross post into it.
Hope you enjoy the instance!
Rules
Rules
- Follow the programming.dev instance rules
- Keep content related to programming in some way
- If you're posting long videos try to add in some form of tldr for those who don't want to watch videos
Wormhole
Follow the wormhole through a path of communities [email protected]
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
I’ve heard a few people refer to perl as a “write-only” language.
There's some truth to it, but it's mostly that junior developers and senior developers with no discipline that give it a bad name.
The major problem is that it has one of the the highest capacities for writting incredibly dense code there is, paired with very powerful language transformation tooling (i.e. switch statements were added as a module, but can also be used for funny evil.)
When I was a Perl programmer, I had to modify this other guy's code, and all I could think was that this guy was writing code with job security in mind.
Imo the amount of magic variables in perl is too damn high.
Like I don't want to have to keep all that in my head while parsing through thousands of lines of code. I spent a few years working as a perl developer and even near my last days there I still found myself digging through docs to figure out what certain symbols meant and did.
My first developer role was as a junior developer and I was tossed into single letter variable loop hell in perl lol.
I was telling my mentor that if I were introduced to perl now that I've got several years of experience in a variety of different languages and thought models, it probably wouldn't bother me as much. I kind of like bash (sometimes) and perl is really a hyper extended scripting language so going from bash to perl isn't too bad. But given that that is what I was started in, I have a massive distaste for it and I doubt that will ever change.
"Explicit is better than implicit" and "There should be one-- and preferably only one --obvious way to do it" in The Zen of Python exist, I'm sure, as a direct reaction to Perl's magic variables and TIMTOWTDI.
OK just checked out that Hodor module. That is hilarious.
As a perl enjoyer I would say it's 50% true and 50% meme. Like with most things on the internet ymmv