The Concepts and Confusions of Prefix, Infix, Postfix and Fully Functional Notations

[Joachim Durchholz]

Twisted schrieb:
> On Jun 11, 5:36 pm, Tim Bradshaw <tfb+goo... at tfeb.org> wrote:
>> I think it's just obvious that this is the case.  What would *stop*
>> you writing maintainable Perl?
> 
> For starters, the fact that there are about six zillion obscure
> operators represented by punctuation marks, instead of a dozen or so.
> More generally, the fact that it comes out looking like modem barf,
> and modem barf is unmaintainable. ;)

You can write Perl that uses just a dozen or so punctuation marks, so 
that doesn't stop you (or anybody else) from writing maintainable Perl.
You haven't looked into the Webmin code that I gave for an example, have 
you? You'd have seen code that's quite far from line noise. (But 
sticking with prejudice can be more fun, I know...)

If anything, the real criticism is that it's easy to write 
unmaintainable Perl, so there's too much of unmaintainable Perl around.

The other criticism is that Perl's learning curve is needlessly 
prolonged because you need time to pick up all those idioms that are 
possible - nice for those who're doing Perl and just Perl, horror for 
those who usually work in other languages.

I don't know of any other serious design flaws in the language, given 
its design goals. (When designing a scripting/glue language today, I'd 
set up slightly different design goals, of course. Perl is far from the 
optimum that should be used today, its main merits are its ubiquity and 
completeness, not the language qualities.)

Regards,
Jo