Re^2: Some thoughts around the "is Perl code maintainable" discussion

[BrowserUk]

++ to you and your reasoning. But ... there had to be one.

The thing I don't understand about the 'size' argument (except which side of it girls really come down on :), is if (say), a 10k line app is maintainable. Then 10 x 10k line 'apps' are also maintainable. No?

So unless you write huge monolithic apps where everything is intimately intertwined with codependencies on everything else--think COBOL programs with single, huge DATA SECTION; or FORTRAN 77 programs with COMMON blocks--then your 100k line app should ostensibly consist of (say) 10 x 10k line apps that communicate through clearly defined interfaces.

So (with a nod to your reference to UNIVERSAL::AUTOLOAD which I've never used, but have seen (dire) reference to), 100k lines apps shouldn't exist (in any language) to become unmaintainable.

Now I know people are going to say that it's unrealistic in a commercial world where needs change and grow over time, but I say no. If you cannot view and maintain your application, as a medium-sized app that uses several medium sized libraries or modules, then you did it wrong--regardless of what language you are using.

That, in my opinion, is the biggest problem with perl itself. Although it is coarsely structured along fairly logical lines, av.c sv.c cv.c hv.c op.c etc. It is all compiled together into a single, humongous lump. Perl5x.dll/.so.

I realise that this is a fact of history and the language used and programming practices at it's inception and on the platform of it's birth, but if those humongous individual C sources were each a subdirectory of related, small files that were compiled individually and linked to create import libraries.

And if those were split along broadly functional lines--the infrastructure (memory management, IO, wrappers over POSIX); the parser; the interpreter; the built-ins--and compiled to separate dlls/sos, then the 1.5 million lines could be seen and treated as 5 or 6 x 250,000 line 'apps'.

Would that make it more maintainable?