Damian Conway On Programming, Perl And More

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.

Comments

Re:Not a troll

[pubjames]

Also, what do you mean they like to write short and clever programs? Doesn't everyone?

On a personal level, anyone who enjoys computer programming enjoys 'short and clever' programs.

On a personal level I appreciate that this is short and clever:

@P=split//,".URRUU\c8R";@d=split//,"\nrekcah xinU / lreP rehtona tsuJ";sub p{
@p{"r$p","u$p"}=(P,P);pipe"r$p","u$p";++$p;($q*= 2) +=$f=!fork;map{$P=$P[$f^ord
($p{$_})&6];$p{$_}=/ ^$P/ix?$P:close$_}keys%p}p;p;p;p;p;map{$p{$_}=~/^[ P.]/&&
close$_}%p;wait until$?;map{/^r/&&}%p;$_=$d[$q];sleep rand(2)if/\S/;print

However, I think you will understand that no serious professional programmer would use this type of programming in a professional context.

Of course, the above example is extreme, but it has to be said that many "perl gurus" enjoy this type of cleverness and cannot stop themselves even in situations where it is inappropriate.

Most professional programmers understand that "short and clever" is very often bad in a large software project. Read, for instance, Code complete by McConnel.

Perl vrs. Python

[phlurg]

Printing an array of hashes in Perl (lifted from O'Reilly book):

# print the whole thing one at a time
for $i ( 0 .. $#LoH ) {
for $role ( keys %{ $LoH[$i] } ) {
print "$i: $role is $LoH[$i]{$role}\n";
}
}
in Python:

for i in range(len(list)):
for key in list[i].keys():
print i, ": " + key + " is " + list[i][key]

Consider line 2 of both examples. Perl's contains 11 non-alphanumeric typographical symbols. Python's contains 6. On a purely visual level alone, I can't imagine anyone preferring to maintain the former over the latter. Furthermore, Perl requires the explicit "% { }" foo so that it knows it's dealing with a hash, an issue Python doesn't face. (Orthogonality... now _there's_ a concept!)

Now take the above Perl example and imagine if you're using a _reference_ to an array of hashes, as in:

foo = \@LoH;
for $i ( 0 .. $#$foo ) {
for $role ( keys %{ $$foo[$i] } ) {
print "$i: $role is $$foo[$i]{$role} \n";
}
}

Sweet Jesus, my eyes are hurting! I started using Python 6 months ago and for general purpose scripting, I swear I'll never go back to Perl if I'm not forced to.