Re: Perl's warts

[jmcnamara]

The majority of replies to this node seem to be from people leaping to the defence of Perl. Is this really necessary? We all understand the power and utility of Perl and in comparison the criticisms made in the article were fairly mild.

Aaron Weiss' article is only one part of a long tutorial that the author has been publishing for almost a year. Why did this one generate so much friction?

People who believes "Perl, Right or Wrong" should read Mark-Jason Dominus' article Why I Hate Advocacy.*

Again, the criticisms were mild. The article is an opportunity to consider another point of view and then get on with what you were doing before.

John.
--
*The "someone" mentioned in the article who "showed up in comp.lang.perl.misc" is a well-known Perl Monk

[Ovid]

I have no problem with people coming up with legitimate issues with Perl. There are many issues that I could come up with that demonstrates a particular weakness in some area or other. The problem I had with this person's criticism, and the problem I have with most criticism of Perl, is that the author of the criticism is trying to compare apples and oranges and complaining that the orange isn't red and that its skin can't be easily bitten through.

Perl, as I mentioned, is fundamentally different from most languages in its approach to programming. It tries to think like you do. One of my biggest complaints regarding other languages is when they try to think like I do, they screw it up. Take VBScript's CDate function, for example:

myDate = Cdate( someval )

The format of "someval" is supposed to be determined by my computer's locale settings. If that setting requires a mm/dd/yy format and I pass that in, all's well in VBScript world. What if I accidentally pass "31/12/00"? VBScript figures that "31" is too large to be a month, so it treats it like a day and the resulting date become December 31st, 2000. What if I pass a null value? The date is set to December, 31, 1899. Well, that's just great. Now I have to write a bunch of extra validation to get around VBScript second-guessing what I intend.

Perl, on the other hand, seems to guess intelligently what I want. That's because of how it was designed. I can't think of any other language that I've worked with which does this.

Like I said, there are valid criticisms of Perl. If you need to write device drivers, GUI apps, or need raw speed, Perl's not for you. Perl even has problems on its own. Caller, for example, doesn't always work as advertised. OO-Perl is SLOW.

In short, Perl has legitimate problems and critics have every right to complain. However, if all they do is come up with the same tired, misunderstood arguments, then Perl advocates are going to point this out.

Please don't take this as the start of a flame war. I'm not trying to get anyone's goat and I apologize in advance if I have.

Cheers,
Ovid

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