Re^10: Modern Perl and the Future of Perl

[chromatic]

Alright, I can understand that, and I agree.

I consider P::C much more like warnings and strict, and -Wall and all of those lovely GCC warnings we keep increasing in Parrot.

Yes, in theory, I'm a good enough programmer that I shouldn't write dubious code. Sometimes I do, though. In particular, I think of -Wc++-compat, which warns about perfectly legal C code that a C++ compiler can't compile. That's not a problem for me or most of our platforms, but a few platforms have C compilers so awful and old and broken that the only hope of compiling anything resembling modern C is with a C++ compiler. If there are C++-style errors in our code, they won't work.

I'm all in favor of using warnings and tools like this to help develop well, and I agree that there's no substitute for wisdom and experience and careful thought... but I just can't see how the tools are bad in and of themselves, when they have good and practical uses.

Yes, there are people who will abuse them. They'll abuse anything though, and in the absence of good tools that thoughtful people could use to do good things, incompetent and malicious people will invent new ways of malice and incompetence. We can't avoid that, so we might as well concentrate on making good things that people can use productively instead.