Exegesis 4 Out

BorrisYeltsin writes "perl.com has Exegesis 4 from the Damian, in repsonse to Larry's latest Apocalypse. This installment covers news of the new flow and block control changes, fully integrated exceptions and some other cool stuff!"

Comments

A lesson learned from Perl5

[FortKnox]

I think you're seeing a lesson learned from perl5.

Before perl5, Larry was told "people want OO in perl", so Larry slapped OO onto perl, instead of resetting and adding OO elegantly. You've already mentioned the result( *wince* ).

Now stuff like Parrot and exception handling needs to be added to perl. But Larry says "Woo! Lets do it right this time" and resets the language.

I think its just a lesson learned (for all language developers, I hope), and hopefully the last reset in perl.

Who let the Java dude in?

[Wee]

Things like this:

return %var{'$' _ $i} = pop(@stack) but true;

and

class Err::BadData is Exception {...}

Make me weep for the future. Although I kind of like the new switch-ish stuff. And the expanded for functionality looks like it could be very handy. But it's messing up my Perl, you know? It's like your teenage kid coming home with blue hair and five earrings (not all of which are in an ear, and only three of which you can readily see). What you thought once was is not what now is.

I know, I know...

• It's going to be painful.
• But it'll get me cool new stuff.
• And so I'll have to learn and use it.
• Then once I do:
  • I won't ever want to go back
    - or -
    
  • I'll wonder how I ever got along before
• And Perl will somehow magically become a "real" programming language that "real" programmers won't laugh at anymore.

OK, I might have been stretching on that last one...

-B

Re:Perl isn't unreadable - some Perl programs are

[geoffeg]

Actually, I disagree and think just the opposite. In many cases, I find that perl is easier to read because of all the "symbols" at the begining of variables and such.

For instance, in Java "String foo;" and in perl "$foo". Now, later in the code, if I see "$foo" in my perl code, I know immediatly that I'm dealing with a scalar, or %foo is a hash, whereas in most other languages I have to either remember the variable declarations or go back and find the variable declaration in the file.

Also, I think alot the supposed unreadability of perl has to do with regex. Since regex is such a basic part of perl, it gets used alot and when you come across "$_ =~ s/^([^ ]*) *([^ ]*)/$2 $1/;" you may attribute the mess of characters to perl when in fact, most of the mess is regex, which exists in many languages.

This is not to say that I haven't see lots of ugly code, perl or otherwise but I don't think perl is really any more difficult to read than other languages.

Just my two cents,
Geoffeg