[geeks] perlish disgruntlement, java considered, sun hardware sought

[David Cantrell]

On Sun, Apr 07, 2002 at 08:53:46PM -0400, alex j avriette wrote:
> We're not talking about short cuts here. We're talking about clear and 
> concise code. If you cant understand map and would prefer foreach, well, 
> thats fine. But my code is going to gain that 10% efficiency for its 
> 5,000,000 iterations.

Did you bother benchmarking your nested maps against my solution using a
single foreach?

> Reducing code is fine with proper indentation. A professional perl 
> programmer can easily understand concise code:
> 
> my %hash = map { chomp; /^([^@]+)@([^\s]+)$/ ? ($1 => $2) : () } 
> read_file("filename")

Errm, proper indentation?  You should indent the second line there so that
it is obvious it is really part of the first and not to be read on its own :-)

And you mean \S, not the harder-to-read [^\s].

If you're going to pontificate on perl style, it's a good idea to learn the
language first.

> right now im migrating a > 20,000 line perl program from one e3000 to a 
> cluster of two e3500's with a new nfs cluster (also two e3500's). the 
> code is hideous. a bug we recently encountered:
> 
> $output = `rsh username hostname command args`;
> ($onevar, $twovar) = split(' ',$output);
> 
> i'm sure you find that very readable. i find it hideous and abhorrent. 

It is indeed very readable.  The only bug I can see is that there is no
error-checking (although that might be done later by looking at the contents
of the two variables, I can't tell from that snippet).

> your c professor would fail you for making system calls in code.

I don't give a rat's arse what your C professor would do.  This isn't C,
and I'm not a student.

> if youre not writing code that is *fit* to be passed from person to 
> person, you shouldnt be writing code.

so if the shell porogramwhich I use for publishing my website is a dog's
breakfast, I shouldn't have written it at all?  How, pray, is one meant
to learn to program if one isn't allowed to write one's first non-
trivial program in $language?  That particular shell program is ugly,
but I have learnt from it.  My next shell program will be better.  That
one though - I can't be bothered to fix it, cos it does the job *and* is
for my use only so no-one else needs to understand it.  Hell, *I* don't
need to understand the code any more.

-- 
Grand Inquisitor Reverend David Cantrell | http://www.cantrell.org.uk/david

   "There seems to be something wrong with our ships today"
     -- Rear-admiral Sir David Beatty, on seeing the Queen Mary
        and the Indefatigable destroyed at the Battle of Jutland