I've been working in Perl recently precisely because of its maintainability. It seems to me that the culture surrounding a language is as important, maybe more important, than the language itself.

To write good maintainable code requires repeated reflection on the structure of the code you are writing, appropriateness of testing apparatus, the possible maintenance issues, not to mention long term readability. All of these things go well beyond the rules of thumb so popular with programming pundits (e.g. rules like "NO function should be more than X lines; NEVER use language feature foo, etc).

In short they require judgment. What the perl community and especially PerlMonks excels at is helping people develop good programming judgment. Testing isn't just a nice to do - it is symbolically and practically raised to a cultural icon via CPAN testers and rich support for testing modules (over 300 testing distributions at my last count).

Or take the idea of rewarding people for voting or simply having logged into a Meditations or Monastery Gate page in the last 24 hours. That encourages people to read and reflect on each others words.

I love Java, C/C++, Lisp, even the uglies DOS, Bash, Awk, Sed, and the pedagogues - Pascal - and the cute - Tcl and the crass - PHP, VB. But of all these langauges, the only one I see with such a rich culture of learning is Perl.

Best, beth

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