25 Sep
2010
25 Sep
'10
11:08 a.m.
Joel Roth wrote:
With all the subtle craft of software development,
I find it suprising to hear a truism that
it's hard to read perl. Harder than lisp?
Hard than C? Harder than Forth?
I don't. I find perl utterly unreadable. Even simple basic perl stuff
eludes me. It's gobbledeygook. But then, I've yet to succeed in even
basic RegEx stuff regardless of language, so maybe I'm not good at
cryptic expressions in general.
Lisp I've glanced at. I think the nesting would drive me crazy.
C and C++ I can at least read.
I used to program in Forth. Forth is very readable - as long as you keep
the context and the stack in mind as you dive deeper into the vocabulary
of the particular program you're reading. (Forth programmers are also
famous for contests in writing the most unreadable one-line programs
that do something non-trivial. They like to do that - popup a one-line
program and challenge another Forth programmer to figure out what it
does. Don't ask me for one of those!)
Regardless of the programming language, the important part is the
design, architecture and coding discipline. Any programmer can write
unreadable, unmaintainable, cryptic code in any language. Explains why
perl is the way it is! ;-)
--
David
gnome(a)hawaii.rr.com
authenticity, honesty, community