[SunRescue] Anyone else here hate Perl?

[P.A.Osborne]

> I was reading some stuff on ESR's site the other day, and I came across his
> article on Perl vs. Python, and I realized something.
> 
> I absolutely hate Perl.

That sounds fairly decisive.

:-)

> The average perl construct of any complexity looks like random line noise
> tied into knots, and is about as easy to follow if you weren't the original
> programmer.

Yup.

> In my line of work I have to go through other peoples perl constantly, and
> man it is a real son of a bitch. It's gotten to the point that when people
> pitch a job to me I actually specifically  say "I dont want to deal with
> other peoples perl"

Absolutely.

> Now don't get me wrong, I like the power and flexibility, but I just think
> they have taken perl way to far. It started out as a relativley simple
> replacement for awk, sed, and sh scripting, and it's still very good at
> that, but people are now writing full applications in perl with GUI's etc...


OK I have to be honest - I use perl for scripting jobs or one offs.  I would
certainly not consider using it to write an application of any kind.  But
they seem to have gone a stage further  perl 5.6  will drop C source code -
bloody horrid C source - but its compilable.

If you want a giggle use perlcc to generate C source for the following:

#!/usr/local/bin/perl
print "Nice easy to understand code\n";

Its huge - no really absolutely sodding huge.

:-)

> To my mind, if you need the kind of capability that the really weird modules
> provide you'd be much better off doing the thing in python or Java, or C.

I prefer C myself and would tend to use that to write anything remotely
sensible - thats not just for my use.

Ho hum.

Paul