[CentOS] OT: programming language for morons (newbie friendly language in Open Source world)

Tue Dec 14 21:50:07 UTC 2010
m.roth at 5-cent.us <m.roth at 5-cent.us>

Kwan Lowe wrote:
> On Tue, Dec 14, 2010 at 4:20 PM, Natxo Asenjo <natxo.asenjo at gmail.com>
> wrote:
>>
>> It kind of gets boring to see Perl attacked for no reason. The problem
<snip>
>>> As to Perl.. though it still is my preferred language for getting
>>> things done (mainly because I understand it that I first think out
>>> problems in Perl then convert to other languages), I have seen some
>>> bad, really bad Perl code..
<snip>
> Some years ago I saw a piece of code that generated code... The
> generated code would individually load every element of an array with
> a zipcode for lookups.  Yes... Rather than load the array directly,
> the code generated a perl script that, on each line, loaded a number
> into a new element of the array. The generated code was thousands of
> lines long, took an hour to start up, and needed a E250 to run. At the
> time my first thought was that the developer got paid based on the
> number of lines of code... Still can't imagine why he would take such
> an approach.

Um, that COBOL code I fixed? The program did nothing other than print
labels, about 6 or 8 chars high, of six digits. Y'know,
  44   44
  44   44
  4444444
       44
       44
? So the previous programmer had written ->36<- (or was it 54?!) seperate
data structures, *each* of which had 0-9. She didn't understand arrays at
all.... I made one set up numbers, of course, and moved each structure in,
which was how I cut about 1500 lines from the program....

          mark