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 > is: if you do not counter the claims, they show up in Google and then > people will think Perl is bad. So this is why one has to set it > straight. > > It is quite funny that when pythonistas come accross 'bad python', they > say: oh, they *clearly* do not understand the language, that is why this > code is bad. So: why would it be different in any other language? > >> 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.. > > of course. Have you seen really bad (C|Python|Visual Basic|shell|.*)? I > guess so too. Will that have to do with the coder of with the language? > It's a balance, certainly... My experience is that the quicker you can get things done in a language, the more likely that you will find bad code examples. I've seen Perl code that does a system 'ls' then counts characters in the string to extract the size information. 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.