Re: Announcing new scripting/prototyping language

From: Dan Pop (Dan.Pop_at_cern.ch)
Date: 02/06/04 

Date: 6 Feb 2004 18:29:43 GMT

In <8QNUb.21269$KV5.15480@nwrdny01.gnilink.net> "Frank J. Lhota" <NOSPAM.lhota.adarose@verizon.net> writes:

>"Joona I Palaste" <palaste@cc.helsinki.fi> wrote in message
>news:bvvjqj$4fb$1@oravannahka.helsinki.fi...
>> ... But C and C++ are a
>> breeze compared to the likes of Perl, Python and Lisp.
>
>I find Perl particularly obtuse. Perl reminds me of those comics where
>obscene language is replaced by a string of random puctuation characters.

It is perfectly possible to write Perl code that is as readable as
well written C code. And it is perfectly possible to write C code that
is as unreadable as badly written Perl code.

It's not the tool, it's the way it's used. Unfortunately, many Perl
tutorials encourage conciseness at the expense of readability. I started
to like Perl only when I realised that I don't have to follow the
tutorial's examples in my own coding.

>Frankly, I don't understand how Perl has caught on when there are more
>powerful, and more readable, string processing languages available.

Probably because Perl is a lot more than a string processing language and
has an excellent interface to the OS primitives. The C-derived syntax
makes it easy to learn to the C programmer, which is another big point,
exploited by many other languages which wanted to benefit from C's
popularity.

Dan 

-- 
Dan Pop
DESY Zeuthen, RZ group
Email: Dan.Pop@ifh.de

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