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posted by Fnord666 on Thursday October 12 2017, @01:07AM   Printer-friendly
from the There’s-more-than-one-way-to-do-it,-but-sometimes-consistency-is-not-a-bad-thing-either dept.

Ruth Holloway at Red Hat's marketing site, OpenSource.com, has a retrospective on three decades of perl covering some history and a few of the top user groups. The powerful and flexible scripting language perl turns 30 at the end of this year. It is a practical extraction and reporting language widely used even today and has a dedicated community. It's ease of use and power made it the go-to tool through the boom of the 90's and 00's when the WWW was growing exponentially. However, its flexible syntax, while often an advantage, also functions as a sort of Rorschach test. One that some programmers fail. Perhaps two of its main strengths are pattern matching and CPAN. The many, mature perl modules available from CPAN make it a first choice for many when needed to draft something quickly or deal with a quick task.


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  • (Score: 2) by canopic jug on Thursday October 12 2017, @07:53AM

    by canopic jug (3949) Subscriber Badge on Thursday October 12 2017, @07:53AM (#581024) Journal

    Indeed. Obfuscated code contests exist for many languages. So the comparison is not apt.

    Perl also makes it very easy to write simple to read code as well. Programmers should naturally, but often don't, gravitate to writing clear, easy to read code because code is read many more times than it is written. So the best cost reductions can come from reducing the burden of reading, especially when other people or the passage of time is involved and therefore programmers need to aim to write clearly. It takes both practice and will. One thing prevents that are the rush to just throw work over the fence and call it finished, same as in any other language. If the coding team, especially the boss, accepts or rewards hard to decipher work then that's what will be produced, regardless of language.

    Messy code can be overcome by a group decisions to do so. An example is what the OpenBSD developers do with their C code by enforcing style(9) [openbsd.org]. It is certainly in any team's self interest and even in programmer's own self-interest to strive to write clearly. Yet some don't. Thus the comment about the Rorschach test.

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