[NBLUG/talk] Perl vs other scripting methods

[William Tracy]

> One of Perl's mottos --
> "There's more than one way to do it!" -- is a celebration of its
> non-monotony.  Perl haters (I still love Perl, myself; but I've figured
> out that its applicability is very constrained) gripe about its
> non-monotony, although not in those terms ("why are there so many ways
> to do the same thing?!").

I think you've hit one reason why I hate Perl. :-) Writing code in it
might not be so bad, but I can't stand working with other people's
code. If you give someone two ways to code something, they will pick
the least readable way to do it. Always!

How many people here have peeked at the Frozen-Bubble source code? I
enjoy playing it as much as the next person but the dang thing is
thousands of lines of rather obfuscated, completely undocumented,
Perl.

I also really don't appreciate the language complexity. I don't need
to learn a gazillion operators--I prefer C/C++/Java approach of
pushing the complexity out of the language and into the libraries.

After poking around in the FB source, I haven't touched a single
scripting language other than Python. :-P

BTW, as for Python/Perl versus Bash, I look at it this way: If you
want to automate other programs, shell scripts are great; if you want
to create your own programs, Python/Perl is better. That's not a hard
and fast line; you can call other programs from Perl/Python, and you
can do some pretty cool things with shell scripts, but it can give you
a clue where to start. :-)

William
(Who just couldn't lurk any longer!)