Slashdot Mirror
Interview With Larry Wall About Perl 6
mholve wrote to us about an interview with Larry Wall [?] regarding Perl 6. Wall is, always, interesting to read. Warning - the text bit is short, most of it is video.
← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)
"hard to learn, hard to use well and devillishly difficult to maintain".
All software sucks, and all programming languages suck. PERL sucks. Python sucks. C sucks. C++ sucks++. etc.
The one thing that is possibly different about PERL is that the guy in charge, who's view of the world is shaped by a polymath background, REALISES that his language sucks, and is trying to make it suck less.
For instance "TIMTOWTDI" might seem like a "sucks" thing to you. You might regard having multiple ways to express the same thing as something that makes a language harder.
But Larry Wall, as a linguist, would say it is a characteristic of all natural languages. In English, for instance, there are countless dozens of ways to rephrase "My silly aunt's accountancy course starts next week."
For instance,
"The accountancy course my silly aunt is taking starts next week".
"Next week my aunt's accountancy course starts. She's silly."
Which of these is correct? All of them. And none of them is more correct than the others.
My point is that language features like the ones Larry Wall has put into PERL (I'm thinking for instance of implicit variables), which some people regard as being bad things, are in fact honest and (for some people at least) helpful attempts to suck less.
And this ongoing quest to suck less, not just than the previous versions of PERL, but to suck less than "programming" in general will continue in PERL 6.
Maybe you should look at a few more languages. And think about a few different ways of doing things.
Perl already has a "name these values" system, the builtin hash type, that applies to all its data. If you want to name your paremeters you pass them as a hash, if you want to just use the order you pass a list... what's so hard about that ??
$result = myfunc( $first, $second, $third );
$result = myfunc2 { subject => $first, day => $somevalue, other => "xyz" };
Now, that wasn't so hard was it ??
I think maybe you mean you don't like loose-typing, but it has its place.
Choose the appropriate language for what you're doing, and use it the appropriate way. Don't bitch because your screwdriver is a lousy hammer.
Cheers
Tim
I usually find that the lack of strong typing means that function interfaces are prone to going wrong in discreet and subtle ways.
Then once you've built a whole pile of code on top something somewhere breaks something else and it's often not easy to chase out the bugs.
Yeah i'd second that.
...but any big project i've attempted just becomes a mess. Perhaps it doesn't lend itself to my rather random and unplanned programming style.
:)
I wouldn't.
It's a very nice langauge for developing little scripts in...
Yes it is, and I can throw off tons of 1 to 10 liners to acomplish the task of would-be complex C or Java programs for common tasks as 'glue' between other programs.
As the author of a 'big project' in Perl, I have to adamantly disagree. It's not Perl's fault. There are some languages that cuff you about the head and shoulders with a club and force you out of your 'random and unplanned' style, but not Perl. If you're an undisciplined programmer from the get go, Perl won't help you.
As Larry said: "You can program Perl in the subset you find easy, using the amount of theory you are (or aren't) comfortable with." So, if you are comfortable with disciplined application design, Perl won't stop you. If you aren't comfortable with it, Perl won't chide you. Either way, the ball's in your court.
As for trying to interpret a script you wrote 3 weeks ago, thats hard. But someone elses.... you must be joking
I revisit my scripts and modules all of the time, even (gasp) up to four years in age. I use something called comments and a little documentation system called POD. I would have never gotten my CS degree had I not developed these habits-- the small Indian professor I had for my favorite class used to turn into The Incredible Hulk if my source didn't have at least as many lines of comment as machine readable code. Granted, in a pinch, you can skimp a bit, but you still need to document your work. The time you save now will be paid with interest later.
As for visiting someone else's code, it depends on the someone else. There are plenty of people in the Perl community who write stunningly beautiful and painfully obvious code. It depends on the programmer and the discipline.
But either way, don't blame Perl for the habits you don't have.