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Is Perl Better Than a Randomly Generated Programming Language?
First time accepted submitter QuantumMist writes "Researchers from Southern Illinois University have published a paper comparing Perl to Quorum(PDF) (their own statistically informed programming language) and Randomo (a programming language whose syntax is partially randomly generated). From the paper: 'Perl users were unable to write programs more accurately than those using a language designed by chance.' Reactions have been enthusiastic, and the authors have responded."
Better? How about we start with distinguishable?
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
How does C++ fair? LOL
The Christian religion has been and still is the principal enemy of moral progress in the world. -- Bertrand Russell
I always thought Perl was a randomly generated programming language.
There's no -1 for "I don't get it."
I'd have to say PERL is better than a lot of purposefully crafted languages. Its syntax is very forgiving, and there are lots of ways to do most things. Those two components are likely the reason this study came to that conclusion. This in no way means that PERL is not a good language. It does mean that many people can write PERL badly, but many people speak English badly and that doesn't reflect poorly on the language. PERL is, IMO, and should always be: Easy to do, but impossible to do "perfectly". But then I'm not sure that anything can truely be done "perfectly". Things may be done poorly, well, very well, or nearly perfectly, but to claim perfection is to deny the possibility of improvement.
What does "random" really mean in this context? This seems more like just a waste of time.
Who taught them Perl? Where did they learn to call subroutines with an ampersand? A Perl 4 manual?
OK they're novices but even I didn't write loops using C-style loops as a novice Perl coder because I was reading that it was more readable to do for($a..$b) instead.
I would think something on the lines of 'what can quorum or randomo do that perl can't' along with the ease of writing hello worlds (as a small side note) would be marginally more interesting.
They claim that Perl is not significantly better than Randomo, but that's just due to the test they chose. Looking at their figure, Perl programmers outperformed Randomo programmers in 6/6 tasks (that is, their means were greater). Using a simple sign test on the differences between the means, the two tailed p value is about 0.03, and the one-tailed p value (I think we're justified here having having a directional hypothesis...) is about 0.015. Both of these numbers are less than 0.05; we are justified in saying that Perl programmers performed significantly better than Randomo programmers, in spite of what the paper says.
Are they telling me that Quorum is better then a randomly generated language at teaching and that Perl makes bad programmers? This sounds more like someone setting up a study and trying to rig it so that their horse (quorum) gets taught in the class room. Personally I stick Perl in the same bucket as VB and most scripts. They may have their uses but new programmers need to be beaten with languages like C and C++ first. Otherwise they learn bad habits. Perl only starts getting good when you use strict so that it has been given permission to beat the programmer for any little mistake.
I went to SIU GREAT party school...... Their CS dept, however, is a complete JOKE...
My guess is that Cobol would beat any of the three - it is designed from the ground up to be readable.
So are Pascal and Python. In fact, Quorum looked a lot like Pascal from what I saw in the PDF.
While Perl has never had a particular reputation for clarity, the fact that our data shows that there is only a 55.2 % (1 - p) chance that Perl affords more accurate performance amongst novices than Randomo, a language that even we, as the designers, nd excruciatingly difcult to understand, was very surprising.
This is a complete misunderstanding of what a p value means in statistical inference. The p value is not, and should not be interpreted as, the chance that "Perl affords more [or less] accurate performance." The p value is the chance, given that there is no difference, of obtaining a difference as large or larger. This is covered in first-year statistics.
I have heard that in Randomo shops they create variable names by closing their eyes and pulling tiles from a Scrabble set.
Is it just me or do their graphs actually show perl above randomo in all tasks? I mean peal is in the 40-60% while randomo is near 20-40%.
The conclusion is then that quorum has 80% compared to 20%, which is significant while the 40 to 20 is not. I call BS.
But for now... If I were a Samurai, I would not start newbies with a live sharp sword. And Modern Perl is so, so very sharp...
I keep reading the full paper (+points for publishing the whole thing!) and have yet to hit upon the definition of the word "accurate" they are using to measure the results. Apparently that is contained inside their previous paper with no direct link. On page 3 though, Perl is described as "A well-known commercial programming language". Really? C# is a commercial language, Perl is an Open Source language with wide commercial adoption that has evolved or the years into several distinct beasts.
1 Dachshund + 1 Dachshunds = A Paradox.
If you give someone Fortran, he has Fortran.
If you give someone Lisp, he has any language he pleases.
-- Guy L. Steele Jr.
Yours In Moscow,
K. Trout
The participants didn't know the languages before. If anything, the study only proved that Perl has a steep learning curve.
.....Perl users were unable to write programs......
Users do not write programs. The entire paper is invalid.
Didn't APL prove this a long time ago?
When Perl is well written, including indents and not jamming multiple lines all together on one line, it looks very similar to Python, but with a semicolon at the end at each line.
I was going to post a string of close parens as representing the termination of a Lisp program, but the comment moderation nanny would not let me do that. So much for trying to tell a geek joke around here.
It's something of an injustice to credit "Southern Illinois University" researchers for this. The unmodified SIU is in Carbondale, while these researchers were in the Edwardsville branch.
One of these days that may happen to me.
How is Java better than C++?
The Christian religion has been and still is the principal enemy of moral progress in the world. -- Bertrand Russell
While it is important for adoption how fast one can learn a language, the long term benefits are much more important. I also needed time to get used to Perl but is now a programmable languages very dear to me: it is reliable, has a great culture, is fast, does evolve only slowly and can be extremely powerful. This is similar to LaTeX, which needs first some efforts to learned but after a while runs circles around any other text processing system. Other programming languages or text processors might be easier to get started with, but they do not scale and limitations will eventually lead to frustration.
You know, the "study" (which I didn't read, this being slashdot 8-) probably involved exposing the languages in question a hugely diverse and wide ranging number of College Undergrads That Fancy Themselves Programmers. As such, the fact that the quality of the code was not distinguishable despite the language chosen indites the programmers more than the languages.
The problem with most studies is that College Freshmen already know everything so any attempt to test them is doomed to fail.
Innocent people shouldn't be forced to pay for inferior software development.
--"Code Complete" Microsoft Press
Never put your Perl before swine... er, wait, what was it again?
$428,054 of taxpayer dollars went to pay for this piece of garbage research.
From the paper: "Randomo [is a] programming language based largely on the syntactical structure of Quorum [...] many of the keywords and symbols were chosen randomly from the ASCII table."
The syntax of a language includes a lot more than the keywords; it's the structure, the types of commands, and so on. But the overall structure of Randomo is the same as that of Quorum, it's only the keywords that were replaced. ;-)
Even if you buy all the rest of the experimental setup, all the authors have shown here is that Perl's keywords and symbols are no better than randomly chosen keywords and symbols. (And really, any idiot who's ever looked at Perl code could tell you that
Also, their tasks are very basic and only use a total of about 10 keywords + symbols. Not so hard to remember, even if they're totally random. Try something more complicated and show us how that goes.
This experiment seems almost tailored to get the results they got. They only used novice programmer who'd never seen Perl before (I would hardly call them "'Perl users" like they do in the abstract). Even worse: "we did not train participants on what each line of syntax actually did in the computer programs. Instead, participants attempted to derive the meaning of the computer code on their own". They were given only 7-10 minutes to solve each task, including figuring out what their code samples mean. Clearly if you've never seen Perl code before, it's going to take you more than 7-10 minutes to understand what's going on. And if you look at the code for their made-up language, Quorum, it's insanely verbose, e.g.:
"action z(integer a, integer b,
integer c) returns number
number d = 0.0"
Of course this is easier to learn if you're not given any explanations about what the keywords mean. But what programmer, short of a total novice, wants to code in a language like that?
Perl is a language, just like Dutch, Swedish, English, German and most of the others. In just about any language there is, to paraphrase a well-known Perl motto, more than one way to say something. That is in many ways a good thing, especially when it comes to using the language creatively as a novelist or poet or similar type of wordsmith does.
It is true that this quality does tend to make Perl programs somewhat hard to grasp for the uninitiated in the programmers style of writing. That is another quality the Perl language shares with those other languages mentioned above - did you understand all of Finnegans Wake the first time you read it?
In other words, Perl is a writers' language. It is not an editors' language. Once you get into the right mood, Perl flows like your native language does. Done right, this can lead to great things. It can also lead to the sort of notes you made when attending those lectures you did not care about in the first place, and did not understand in the second. Use Perl for things you care about, and it will provide you the means to express yourself in just the right way (for you).
--frank[at]unternet.org
Er.... no novice can write "perl" code. This is as true as winters being cold.
Perl is a very complex language. More complex than traditional procedural languages which "novices" are used to. It's hard to do anything useful with perl when you start, as it is easy to write complex stuff when you learn it.
I don't even know why perl shows up here.
How can a perl novice understand what "chomp while chomp;" does ?
I thought Perl WAS a randomly generated language - you mean someone came up with Perl on purpose?
Ken
But for now... If I were a Samurai, I would not start newbies with a live sharp sword. And Modern Perl is so, so very sharp...
heh, as someone whom tried, and failed, to fully comprehend Perl, I definately agree. To keep all of Perl in one's head is a big struggle. On the other hand, the sheer terseness is VERY impressive. swiss army chainsaw seems an accurate term. I just wish Perl 5 had a good OO system. I had hopes for Perl 6 coming out, but it doesn't seem to be coming.
I think one has to be programming Perl for 40+ hours a week, in order for their mind to stay fresh enough in Perl to fully utilize it. I think Perl is beyond the average human's ability, much like lisp.
me: My hovercraft (pantomimes puffing a cigarette)... is full of eels (pretends to strike a match).
them: Ahh, matches!
me: Ya! Ya! Ya! Ya! Do you waaaaant... do you waaaaaant... to come back to my place, bouncy bouncy?
This paper is about program language syntax, and frankly speaking I think it's a shame that after so many decades of programming language research syntax is still being discussed and people constantly come up with new ways of writing down the same. Why do people invent a new syntax every time they invent a new language as if it mattered at all? Who the fuck cares about syntax?
However, if we must talk about syntax, I'm really wondering whether there is anyone out there who honestly believes that there is anything wrong with LISP style S-expressions, which is about the simplest syntax you can get, after actually having completed several large projects in a prefix LISP-style language with standard reader. For it seems that most if not all people ranting about parentheses and s-expressions have never really used any such language. I'm fine with being wrong about this, so I'd like to know: Is there anyone on /. who has actually programmed a lot with a LISP-style language and didn't like for its syntax or had problems with its syntax? What was the problem with it? (Parentheses? Well, then use Algol-68 instead.)
In brief, shouldn't the discussion be about programming language semantics instead? There is still lots of work to do regarding parallel programming constructs.
Wow, how much time did they spend studing the premise that people working with a tool they know are able to "more accurately" write programs than users of language they don't know...
I think I'll file this right after the study on why" holding heavy things makes my arms hurt" and "people who know where they are going tend to not rely on their GPS" studies...
Ken
Getting back to the actual subject. Does this study suggest that better programming is done when the programmers are encouraged to ignore their usual logical patterns? It seems to me that this study says that for most people"more intuitive programming" means "less accurate programming".
There are severe issues with their tests.
1) Their sample size is very small. Only 18 people.
2) They taught the people in the same order which may affect how they learn the language. Learning Quorum and then PERL might confuse the students in the syntax learning PERL causing errors. Similarly while Randomo used similar syntax the change in characters might have caused issues. Shuffling the order of how they learn the language would alleviate this possible error injection.
3) The instructions they used might have not been the easiest to initially teach non-programming students. Using || instead of 'or' in PERL is a C-ism. The students probably would have performed better if the instruction was geared more towards using an easier structure.
4) Only one real world language was used and one that is highly touted as flexible. A more structured language might have been better (like Python) or more languages (tcl, bash, javascript, etc.)
C'mon. You're messin' with me aren't you?
Please do not read this sig. Thank you.
If you ask a novice to sit down and learn the tool chain it takes to write "hello world" in Java vs just about any other language, you'll be conducting a fair test that is actually relevant to novices.
Seastead this.
Why should anybody care about novice users?
They're using outdated perl syntax. And taking advantage of things you shouldn't be doing even if they're allowed. Lots of languages let you do things and caution you not to. Not saying "return" or using good variable names or declaring scope on variables isn't good.
Regardless of how hard a language is to learn, once you "get it" you pretty much "get it" for 90% of other languages too. For instance, I can read and translate both Quorum and Randomo just by looking at the examples provided. That doesn't make the languages easy to use or better, or make perl worse, they're just different cases.
Users have to learn the fundamentals of programming before they can program. Conditionals, loops, subroutines, Boolean logic. All of which were touched on by their sample. To me, changing "sub" or "function" to "action" doesn't make things any clearer, it just seems like you're trying to reinvent pascal. Repeat b-a times is kind of nice, but you could do the same by saying for($a..$b) { } (which arguably is less clear than the repeat statement but just as true, you want it to repeat for all integers between $a and $b)
Also, removing parenthesis might make things clearer for simple logic but what about if d + e > 4 * x? Now you've introduced ambiguity, or at least forced the user to memorize order of operations rather than letting them be clear in their statement.
They also acknowledge they only tested 18 people, which isn't a big enough sample set to know if they're on to something. They've essentially asked "which is easier to understand, psuedocode or badly written real languages with no comments" and the answer is pseudocode, but it's still not intuitive what the program does.
I think they're failing to understand that people writing code now might not even understand modulus. While that's sad, it's also important to grasp what level of novice you're dealing with before training them. Visual Basic will let you write a minesweeper game without doing any math. Does that count as easier, or does math still have a place? (When I see novice programmers writing logic that doesn't use math it generally means they've unrolled what you would be doing mathematically and done a bad job of it)
In summary, I like perl. Many people from the python/ruby/php communities have already had their fun pooping on the party so if you're going to attack the language please make sure your arguments hold some weight. There are definitely problems but syntax isn't one of them unless you run with scissors every time your parents hand them to you. Perl has very few training wheels and therefor you get people giving bad examples, but if you ignore those it just gets things done.
Ok, sorry, but I'm just going to call nonsense on that one, lol. Either you have no idea of the scope of problems that can be addressed in 250 lines (and perhaps no idea what a c line *is*), or you're one of the world's worst c programmers.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
Ain't surprising that Perl and Python win for string stuff, but :
C beat both Java and C++. C has no string type! LOL
The Christian religion has been and still is the principal enemy of moral progress in the world. -- Bertrand Russell
"Its syntax is very forgiving, and there are lots of ways to do most things"
Am I the only person who sees this as one of the biggest problems with PERL? Don't get me wrong, I love choice and having options. But when you're learning a language you do not want 10 different styles of writing a function, statement, loop, whatever. Because when you are working with 10+ people you now have 1 language, 10 different ways to write in (and now 10 different ways you need to read).
When I first started learning PERL and reading books, websites and downloading examples all the different styles of writing in PERL was the biggest problem. You can't just simply learn how to do an IF statement, you have to learn the 20+ different ways you COULD write an IF statement, since every example you will find online will be totally different.
TruePunk | Games
Since Perl was obviously generated from random components of all known computing languages this should not be surprising. Of course Larry and company could improve their score if they could agree on some regular syntax for Perl-6. Otherwise Perl-6 will be worse because they now have a new universe of nondescript languages to mix into the perl stew ... but I still think Perl needs a splat statement. Not sure what it should do, but it might be the first, and if not, it would b up2date. I discovered Perl many years ago, after a lot of years doing PL/1. Perl has become the universal computing language PL/1 wanted to be.
...which begs an interesting question, why doesn't source control include some sort of formatting neutral diff system? Imagine code that you format using style "a", because you prefer it, is uploaded to the server, which removes all formatting and saves it. I download your changes, and upon download, style "b" formatting is applied. When I look at changes, formatting differences are negated. Seems like a very useful feature.
HA! I just wasted some of your bandwidth with a frivolous sig!
Also, after more than a decade, there's finally going to be a 4th edition of the Camel book (hopefully in time for the holidays)!
sub randomlanguage()
{
my $a = shift(@_);
my $b = shift(@_);
foreach my $stmt (@(shift(@_))
{
next unless ((index($c, $a) >= 0) and (index($c,reverse($a))));
print("valid-stmt:(\"$stmt)\");
}
}
>They claim that Perl is not significantly better than Randomo, but that's just due to the test they chose. Looking at their figure, Perl programmers outperformed >Randomo programmers in 6/6 tasks (that is, their means were greater). Using a simple sign test [wikipedia.org] on the differences between the means, the two tailed > p value is about 0.03, and the one-tailed p value (I think we're justified here having having a directional hypothesis...) is about 0.015. Both of these numbers are less > than 0.05; we are justified in saying that Perl programmers performed significantly better than Randomo programmers, in spite of what the paper says.
Incorrect. The researchers used a repeated measures design which requires a --- repeated measures anova and a sphericity test. This is exactly what the researchers did. Sign tests aren't what you want here because they ... ya know ... don't take repeated measures into account. Shocking!
I thought Perl *was* a randomly generated programming language. I think Perl users tend to fall into two groups -- the ones who thrive on it, and the ones who get violent headaches from too extended a contact with the language. (I'm in the latter group.)
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
For a language that's considered so obtuse and that nobody seems to love, it sure does have a ton of great modules to do practically anything you can think of that needs doing. I can think of a lot of languages that only *WISH* they had such a rich toolkit to offer their proponents.
Of course from the perspective of a Haskell programmer, this looks like a wonderful, eye pleasing, nicely choreographed beauty of a nasty-tooth-and-claw retard bare-fist clubbing.
I imagine Perl as a redneck with a bib-and-brace overall dirty from pig farming, a straw in his mouth, large paws with sausage fingers as dirty as a pig's snout and as rough as sandpaper, wrapped around a last-century-style pitchfork and a bottle with "XXX" on it.
And in the other corners of the pit we have PHP, which had trouble qualifying as a language at all, since it requested the usage of its own type-detection engine, and all the judges could make out was that it was a, and I quote "Somethingsomething wrapped in a huge Variant that walks like a constant and talks like a String, barely resembling a Python-style Gumby".
Python, the language, immediately filed charges of being "massively offended and fluffing its peacock feathers with a loud gobbledygook because of there being even a slight chance of it being compared to PHP", and walked away from the pit, leaving feathers left and right.
Finally we have "Sir" expected-to-go-down-first-and-declare-flawless-victory Ruby, seen here on the left for which the word "slow" just doesn't say it anymore.
JavaScript's application was not accepted this year on the grounds of "actually being quite popular, used a lot, and having grown up from a horrible piece of shit to something quite-but-not-entierly-utterly-disgusting".
I started with Python, and I was struck by how the syntax was relatively close to natural English. Someone said it looked like BASIC, even.
Python: Relatively easy for newbies to pick up on, while still being a full-powered general-purpose language
I listen to both RIAA and non-RIAA stuff if I like the music, tangential business/politics nonwithstanding.
Really, Python's problem is that both spaces and tabs are legal
Open IDLE, Options > Configure IDLE... "Python Standard: 4 Spaces!"
If their purpose was to show that good programming habits are hard to teach with Perl as a base, that makes sense because Perl is rather forgiving of things that other languages would flat out reject.
That, however, does not on its own make Perl "bad" or even "worse" than any other language as a whole. Tragically, that seems to be the message that the summary is trying to convey here.
Taking two programming languages - any combination of two languages - and trying to call one "good" and the other "bad" is idiotic at the very least. It is like setting a chainsaw next to a Glock and asking someone to tell you which one is bad and which one is good. Both are useful and you can't compare the two on just one dimension and expect to have meaningful results of that comparison.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
Is Perl Better Than Another Randomly Generated Programming Language?
It's great for quick and dirty - unfortunately, everything written in perl tends to look like it was done "quick and dirty." Programming "clean" perl means ignoring most of perl's features, at which point you might as well just switch to a cleaner language.
The paper talks about things like "repeat" being more intuitive than "for"... I wonder if the authors considered testing languages like Hypertalk or AppleScript that are purposely designed for novice use. It would be interesting to see if they work. However, my gut (very unscientific) tells me that most professionals learn to think in the syntax they adopt, and other factors come into play than this intuitiveness. These might include efficiency (or density) of the language and ease of debugging (the whitespace issue). A test like this does not say much about the usefulness of a language to someone who devotes themselves to it.
Looking at the paper, I can see that quorum is wordy, using full words for most of its syntax. This makes it friendly to beginners. Indeed, this is what the results showed; novice programmers for whom quorum was their first language could understand it more easily than perl. But, a wordy language is annoying and inefficient for pros. The quorum example code has many more characters than the perl or randomo code, which means much more typing. A smart IDE can help to a point, but it can't completely remove the overhead of extra verbiage.
mmmm no. i retarded monkeys ass could have done better than perl. nothing to see here. move along
The study (and I don't think it represents itself correctly) was presenting code samples and telling people to learn from them how to write a program in that language.
The participants were presented with something which looked a lot like a modern version of basic (Quorum) a random-ish programming language, and perl. The sample programs were written as best as could be written, I suppose, in that language; the Quorum samples were written like you'd expect a basic program to be written; and the perl sample programs (as shown in the PDF) were written like basic programs by someone who clearly had no idea how to write a decent perl program.
None of the syntactic aids which perl is so rich in were used. Variables & function names were chosen like in old basic or fortran. Integers were initialized like reals. The study shows that when incompetent programmers are told how to program by incompetent programmers, it's helpful to make a programming language have a more immediately and superficially helpful syntax.
Duh.
If they'd given these people a book and some time, they would have certainly have written better programs in perl than in the random language. Possibly better than in Quorum, though I doubt it. People have a lot of baggage/experience with basic and the languages which derived ideas from it, so that Quorum (as presented in these code examples) would seem more natural to them. These people weren't programmers, they were people who wanted $10. A random sample of college students will find a bunch of hits on people who have used basic, and some who might have done something in java -- I suspect about 20% to 30%. But how many will have experience with a novel language like perl? One? (I am just guessing on those numbers. Notably missing from this study is any analysis of the experiences of the subjects, which would have given us some clue to those numbers, albeit with this small sample size.)
Cobol would have been alien to them too, and the designers of this study would have tried to make it look like basic, since that's what they seem to know.
Perl written by a good perl programmer is easy to read. Unfortunately though bad programmers decide to write over complicated code just to confuse people and show that they are awesome because they know what it does. Thats not really the languages fault (though It could be designed to prevent it). If you see perl thats hard to read the first thing to shout is "Who the hell wrote this?".
If you put a million monkeys at a million keyboards, one of them will eventually write a Java program. The rest of them will write Perl programs.
The truth or interpretation..
Ok, I gots to know:
Why is $_[n] for getting the values of arguments error prone?
Less importantly, why is &foo bad perl code?
In this thread, I've seen these ideas presented as self evident, but this is the first time I've encountered them.
Plan My Week for iPhone
I discovered PERL probably about 15 years ago. It reminded me in some weird ways of the basic I learned as a kid, so I picked it up almost overnight. Since then, I've learned Pascal, Java, PHP, Python, ActionScript, some Ruby, the usual suspects... but always come back to PERL. It works for everything; local, remote, applications, CGI, etc... truly my swiss army knife of languages. I have yet to run in to a problem it can't solve. Several years ago, the language started to get that "dead language" rap... many designers I worked with, would make the same comment to me, "you still use PERL? Who still uses PERL?"
(By the way, I know you're not supposed to capitalize all the letters, but I prefer it that way for some reason.)
Then, I went to a PERL seminar a few years back, and one of the speakers revealed some startling statistics - despite the "dead language rap", CPAN had increased in size almost 700%, and downloads of PERL had increased over 1000%... for a "dead language", it was kind of refusing to lie down. It was seemingly available EVERYWHERE by default; every web server I've ever worked on has it, and every local admin job I've taken has it already installed in-house. It works flawlessly across any platform, and it is bullet-proof reliable.
Since then, I've invested even more time and faith in it, and I am happily anticipating PERL6. But mostly because of my faith in Larry Wall - he truly is brilliant, and an under-appreciated icon of programmers everywhere. The fact that its taking so long is slightly bothersome; but Larry is trying to get it right - and from what I've seen of PERL6, I think he's struck the perfect balance in language creation... and the integration with Parrot will make it the ultimate glue language. Long live PERL!
You can write obfuscated code in any language. Perl uses a few special variables you have to learn, but compared to say C++ templates they're not bad. (I guess very few people use and understand C++ templates, which approach looking like line noise, so it isn't as in-your-face as widely used Perl.) Perl allows in-line regular expressions, which makes programs look like line noise, but any programming language with regexes is going to look like that. It's just the Python, Java, etc don't have regexes built into the language but in libraries so it's not as obvious. But you typically use Perl for tasks that require regexes, which makes sense for them to be part of the language. I can write ugly code in any language, so Perl is no big exception, but with modules and functions you can write Perl code that looks a lot like C. For someone who uses C and Java, Perl is much easier to cognitively switch to than say Python or Ruby. And languages like Erlang or R look like their syntax was developed by space aliens using hieroglyphics. At least Perl resembles other languages I use regularly. Making the cognitive jump from say, C to JavaScript, is not fun.
I've been hearing this meme "Perl was designed 'linguistically'" repeated for years and years as a justification for writing code that is hideous to everyone except the person who wrote it.
What does this even mean, "Perl was designed 'linguistically'"? Show me a concrete example.
What is this unquantified "beauty" that Perl supposedly facilitates above all else? Show me a piece of beauty that doesn't (a) doesn't depend on whitespace, and (b) doesn't rely on operators converted to English words, and (c) isn't obfuscatory Perl Golf.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Comments above show this paper does not study what it purports to study and draws false conclusions based on a non-understanding of statistics. Is it my imagination or are we getting more and more crap papers like this on /.?
It's so boring listening to little Perl haters. They always seem to have some chip on their shoulder as if Perl were the one language they just couldn't ever get. As if that C++ is any fun. Please, *must* I write in C++? Perl is a writer's language, if you are in the habit of using it you can write hard code [b]very[/b] fast. Brilliant prototyping, unbeaten RE/text manipulation, an unmatched repo of prewritten library code in CPAN, and a real "soul" that encourages one to have a stab at that complex regex only to discover it actually works first time. And that poetic sense that line noise is never just line noise. And finally: as great as sed and awk are, if you know a little Perl you won't need sed or awk for anything.
We're all supposed to be "knocking up" everything in Python. Yawn. I'm sure Python's great and I like the built in library (no way comes close to CPAN though). But Perl has character. There are intangible things that will attract one to a language. Perl can do things simply or Perl can do things hard. There is a wealth of intellectual complexity in Perl or just pattern-obsessed autism, either way it works. Perl rocks.
I suppose I should be pleased that Ruby is still fashionable. Ruby syntax is based on Perl and Larry has said that Perl OoO takes a lot from Ruby.
Interesting... I found their CS department to be OK.. but I got my BS-CS back in '93 at SIU-C. Maybe the department has changed, I know the landscape of CS certainly has. But these researchers are from SIU-E, and I don't even think they had a CS department back then. I don't think you can discount the research entirely based on where it came from.
My beliefs do not require that you agree with them.
This exercise was so shallow in what it attempted to measure that the results are basically meaningless. Did the test evaluate object oriented programming? Did it address useability of code (i.e., perl modules)? Did it look at the existing repository of user contributed functions (CPAN) that allow the user to get a lot further down the road that any new language would?
From the current CPAN page it states "the Comprehensive Perl Archive Network (CPAN) currently has 100,866 Perl modules in 23,634 distributions, written by 9,300 authors, mirrored on 269 servers". You cannot ignore CPAN if you evaluate Perl.
After your company spends a zillion dollars on writing applications in randomly generated code, where are you going to hire experienced developers that can maintain that code? There is a heluva lot more to evaluating a language than seeing how long it takes beginning programers to turn pseudo code into working code.
This study strikes me as problematic in several ways.
Presumably the Quorum language is meant strictly for teaching, A language "where the syntax, semantics, and API designs change in correspondence to the latest academic research and literature on programming language usability" would be a nightmare to actually use for anything.
Given that, it seems prudent to compare it against the kind of language that is ACTUALLY used for teaching.
I'm by no means a Perl apologist, it does what it does...but I've never heard of anyone using Perl for teaching purposes. Why not compare it to something like Pascal, which is INTENDED to teaching? Or even Python, which is built on a philosophy of simplicity? Or Java, which is still probably the most commonly taught language?
Can an expert in Randomo code in Perl without knowing Perl beforehand?
It occurs to me that Perl is just the web replacing the gap left by Teco.