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

Tue Dec 14 19:16:02 UTC 2010
Adam Tauno Williams <awilliam at whitemice.org>

On Tue, 2010-12-14 at 11:04 -0600, Les Mikesell wrote:
> On 12/14/2010 10:46 AM, m.roth at 5-cent.us wrote:
> > Yup.
> > <snip>
> >> yet-another-syntax for config files.   But, it is somewhat hard to scale
> >> and maintain because people write in different styles and things that
> >> start small tend to have a lot of global variables that are hard to
> >> remember as the code grows.  And perl is not great for GUI programs.
> > *snarl*
> > There is *no* excuse for lots of globals. Pass your stuff. The most
> > complicated programs I've ever written in perl (I guess that was the
> > billing system for a very small telecom, 600-700 lines or more) had less
> > than 10 globals, and maybe less than five (it's been 6 years since I was
> > there, so I don't remember). Using globals is *lousy*, *lazy* programming,
> > and I wouldn't trust folks that write anything more than a 20 or 30 line
> > script to program *anything* until they'd gone back and internalized
> > modular coding. And then I'd review their code for the next six months....
> > <snip>
> Keep in mind that you can do some amazing things with a 30 line...

in just about any language [funny, Perl, Python, PHP, people all trot
this one out to advocate their favorite language].  It is true in all of
them.

Personally I've banned Perl from the network primarily because of the
maintenance disaster that is CPAN.