

Perl Myths (slides from OSCON 2008) - soundsop
http://timbunce.files.wordpress.com/2008/07/perl-myths-200807-noteskey.pdf

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greyman
Being an application developer myself (C++,C#,VB, Java...), I stumbled across
Perl when I had to code some text parsing scripts.

From my perspective as an amateur in Perl, I found some similarities with C++
- in my opinion Perl is expressive, powerful and even beautiful. But I also
came across one problem (called "Myth" in the presentation), which is that
Perl code is not very maintainable.

Of course, code in any language can be made maintainable with proper
practices, but I must say that when I looked at my old code 12 months later, I
just didn't know what exactly it does. So I consider Perl to not be a best
choice for occasional use: I always had to re-learn the syntax and decipher my
old code - something I didn't have problem with in other languages.

To sum it up, Perl is a great language, but requires a lot of dedication like
C++ does. So the eternal question still remains - Perl, Ruby or Python? ;-)

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kingkongrevenge
> not be a best choice for occasional use

That's a reasonable point, but I struggle to see how other powerful languages
differ. Complex syntax and idioms are part of the deal if you want to use a
powerful language. There's always BASIC...

I have never had any problem reading perl, whether my own or others'.

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newt0311
Actually no. Take lisp for example. It's syntax can be described in a few
lines. The functions also are usually quite straight forward and its pretty
easy to go back to previous code. Or try python. This language is also pretty
easy to work with. The syntax is consistent and the one right way to do thinks
philosophy means that reading even other people's code is not a big problem.
Contrast this with perl...

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kingkongrevenge
Those languages are simple if you use the same basic constructs available in
every procedural language. You can write BASIC in any language, including
Perl. Otherwise, you have to learn complexity.

Yes, I'm sure description of lisp's loop function would fit in your few
lines...

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j2d2
This seems to rely on Larry Wall quotes as evidence.

 _Edit: I didn't say exclusively... Sheesh..._

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evilneanderthal
did you completely fail to notice the graphs and numerical data provided?

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greyman
No, he is somewhat right. ;-) The "myth" that Perl is hard to maintain was
"busted" by quote of Larry followed by mentioning some testing tools. ;-)

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olavk
And the "myth" that Perl is hard to read was "busted" by showing that someone
wrote a book called Perl Best Practices. I don't think that will convince
anyone not already convinced :)

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thomasmallen
I know for a fact that I watched a video of this presentation in the
Spring...OSCON must have been a re-run.

Here it is: <http://blog.timbunce.org/2008/03/08/perl-myths/>

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wheels
Please don't link stories directly to PDFs; it does odd things with the RSS
feed.

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Hexstream
{Sh,C}ouldn't the RSS feed be fixed instead?

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wheels
Potentially, but I'd say it's probably not the highest priority issue in the
fixes queue. The site guidelines offer a compromise:

 _If you submit a link to a video or pdf, please warn us by appending [video]
or [pdf] to the title._

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Hexstream
PDF's are already detected and marked as such, as can be implied from the
automatic appending of [scribd].

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wheels
That unfortunately seems to not be true as evidenced by the other pdf linked
from the front page which isn't marked as such.

