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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."
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.
Yet another ridiculous summary. The study wasn't which language was better, it was in which language can first-time users write a program more accurately. My guess is that Cobol would beat any of the three - it is designed from the ground up to be readable.
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.
Yes it was Perl 4, which is one of the flaws in this study.
Is Betteridge's Law of Headlines Correct?
"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 not trained. They were just shown code samples with no explanation. The code samples had 1-letter variable names and no comments. The Perl sample uses $_[0} for getting the first sub argument instead of shift, and "for ($i = $a; $i = $b; $i++)" to do a for loop instead of "foreach $i ($a .. $b)", so it is deliberately obfuscated Perl.