Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Damian Conway On Programming, Perl And More

Posted by timothy on from the serious-advice dept.

Andrew writes: "My host pair.com has an interview with Damian Conway in which he talks a lot about his upcoming modules, and what skills a Perl programmer needs. I'm personally waiting on Parse::FastDescent." Conway talks about some interesting modules he's working on, Perl 6, and on programming in general, too.

2 of 185 comments (clear)

  1. Discipline in art is independant of the medium by Crag · · Score: 5, Insightful

    It's true that individualistic programing styles can slow down a project, and it's true that perl allows almost infinite programming style, or lack of same. However, the two issues are orthogonal, and Perl itself is not bad for cooperation. Just ask the CPAN developers.

    Next, 'programming' is not the same as 'coding'. Programming has come to mean all the terms the author of the above post used: Design, Engineering, Requirements, Documentation.

    The author of this post is half-right, but missing the big picture. There are folks who develop with maturity and discipline with Perl, and there are folks who write garbage in every language. The freedom to screw ourselves over is necessary for us to learn how not to screw ourselves over.

    So no, Perl isn't bad for teams, self-centered programers are bad for teams. I should know, I've been that programmer.

    (If I felt like invoking flame-mode, I'd suggest that perhaps the poster is coming from an academic or corporate background where individualism is bad for the hierarchy... :)

  2. I really don't get it by Christianfreak · · Score: 5, Insightful

    I make my living as a perl programmer

    I do not understand why a majority of people on /. are so quick to flame Perl. If you don't like it don't use it but don't flame people who do. I love Perl. As far is being hard to read or understand well I think that's people who have never tried. When I started coding Perl I was a complete newbie. I'd done a little C and a bit of Basic and I wanted to learn how to right CGI scripts. Someone showed me Perl and inside a week I was writting (badly but still writting) a message board. It took me weeks, it was horrid but it worked. I know very few people who can do that in any other language. In fact it was Perl that got me to move away from the darkside of Windows (this was before ActiveState made Perl on Windows a more manageable beast).

    Try it before you knock it. Give it a chance. If you don't like it then use the tool you like but don't keep spreading flames and lies about it. Saying its only good for 500 line programs or that its always unmaintainable or it can't be used by teams simply isn't true. And ANY language can have all of those attributes.

    Perl also has a great community that I've not seen in other languages. Don't know how to do something, ask Perlmonks. Those guys are even one of the few places where newbies can come. Very rarely do I even see someone screaming RTFM at them. Most of the time you just get your question answered and answered fast. There are other places that aren't so kind.

    Perl is great. Long live Perl

    --
    The Anti-Blog