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Postings from May 2000
At 17.14 -0500 2000.05.25, Elaine -HFB- Ashton wrote: >Tom Christiansen [tchrist@chthon.perl.com] quoth: >*>more conceptual blindspots. It's like knowing how to boil but not >*>fry. Programming is not a skill one develops in five easy lessons. > >Indeed. But, what is it about Perl that attracts the sort of mythology it >has? Splitting the hairs of reality aside, the perception of people who >either haven't used it or have only dabbled is that it's bloated, >inefficient, hard to learn, obfuscated, hard to maintain, etc. Well, not all of those criticisms are entirely undeserved. But the reason they are so widespread is because Perl is so popular. Not only does the popular technology attract a lot of criticism (due and undue), but it attracts people who make it look worse than it is. >A rather bright engineer here recently commented that "Perl is not for >production code, period." and he has never actually used the language. How >can you defend Perl to someone who is in a policy making position, is >stubborn and has this perception of Perl he has picked up from the >net, colleagues, etc.? You can't. Well, I would tell him that he is not as bright as he thinks, and if he persists, inform him that he is downright ignorant. I'd say it as politely as possible and necessary, of course. But I would say it. >I'm using more shell and awk than I have >in years these days. I'd get another job. Using other languages is fine. But spending my days drearily plodding through awk and shell when I could be having fun in Perl is, like, real work or something. -- Chris Nandor | pudge@pobox.com | http://pudge.net/ Andover.Net | chris.nandor@andover.net | http://slashcode.com/Thread Previous | Thread Next