Re^2: "Baby" Perl versus "Bad" Perl

[chanio]

I agree too!

'Hell is full of people with good intentions.'

I guess that it all depends on the target that the writer is pointing to.

If you read a book of someone that is teaching perl to crack certain machines and steal something. You would not be able to judge him as a good or bad perl evangelist, because:

• 1) He has surely proved that his code works like he wants to. And his readers buy his book because they know what he did with perl.
• 2) It is not supposed to be good code. It is not targeted to all the world.

Like any other piece of comunication. It all depends on one's own common sense. Or at least, on the money invested by people that know nothing about programing :)

[Your Mother]

It is not supposed to be good code. It is not targeted to all the world

That's kind of like saying: "The Feces Cookbook" is a fine piece of writing because it's not targeted to all the world.

We generally only tolerate this low quality of writing in journalism. Technical books of any sort are, and should be, held to a higher standard.

[chanio]

We generally only tolerate this low quality of writing in journalism. Technical books of any sort are, and should be, held to a higher standard.

You are always right. But it depends on how it is classified when it is sold. It shouldn't depend solely on the authors opinion, don't you think? That is where critics should do their job.

I mean, Larry Wall once stated a difference between programing well and becoming a qualified expert. It all depends on what you use perl for.

I like naive aproaches to perl programing, because their target is very limited. Then certain readers do not feel intimidated by complex academic concepts. Perl is a better tool than DOS's Batch, but people is still using that limited language! Or even other more esoteric ones. Some simpler languages succeed in fields where perl should always be the main reference. Just because their authors were not pretending more than what they targeted to.

I wonder what would had happened if Windows people had always worked with perl as a glue language to do simple things. Perhaps, they would have all been now working with LINUX :) .

[Your Mother]

I agree on the basic premise: simple, or simplistic, Perl should not be frowned on; unless it's for a bank or a million hit per day site or something. But simple does not equal wrong or sloppy. I wrote a lot of crappy, naïve code myself that got mountains of work done without, for the most part, incident while boosting the reputation of Perl in the non-techies around me who were unable to detect the odor of code but were able to see how fast Perl could do things. So I know exactly how valuable even bad Perl can be.

It's possible to teach simplistically without teaching incorrect things. It's also much harder to relearn something you were originally taught wrong than to take the time and effort to learn something right the first try. Once something goes through a publisher and has an ISBN attached, it's open for stronger critique than if it were just some dusty corner of the Internet.