note
steves
<p>
Interesting tangent about syntactic elegance ... I have not
seen enough differences in Perl6 to say it has significant
syntactic elegance over Perl5. Can you point out some
specific examples?
</p><p>
You mention <b>COBOL</b> which I had the (mis)fortune of
getting paid to program in for a short time back when I
was a college intern. In addition to liberal <b>GOTO</b>
use, the code was peppered with <b>ALTER</b> statements,
which is <b>COBOL</b>'s way of writing self modifying code.
So, far from being elegant to maintain, it was a
syntactically pleasing maintenance nightmare I inherited.
</p><p>
After that I worked on some easy to maintain <b>C</b>,
then <b>C++</b>, then <b>C</b> code. <b>C</b> is really
only a step or two above assembler if you look at it
honestly. The reason for the ease of maintenance had less
to do with the language than it did with the design and with
the logical way the problems were abstracted and factored
down to interfaces.
</p><p>
So I'm not sure I believe that
syntactic changes will make a huge difference, although I
agree with you that coming more towards that Java-like
middle ground syntax helps those less capable programmers
pick things up faster.
</p><p>
Then there's the Java code I inherited that had one method
named <i>main</i> ...
</p>
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