You got me all wrong! ; -) => Re: Simple programming language anyone?

[Andy Harrison]

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On 6/14/07, Derek Broughton  wrote:
>
> There's no call for insults.  "perldoc" seems to be installed with perl,
> but "man perldoc" doesn't exist and:
>   $ perldoc --help
>   You need to install the perl-doc package to use this program.
>
> So I installed perl-doc, I still couldn't get perldoc to work (I don't know
> whether it actually installed man pages), and I gave up and removed it
> again.  Not worth the frustration.  Write-only documentation.  PEBDAP.

PEBDAP.  I like that one.  :)

Odd, not sure why you'd have that trouble.  Works fine for me, though
it's definitely annoying that the packagers have changed the default
perl install so that it purposely does not include the important
perldoc...


> > Don't blame Perl the language for poorly written, unreadable Perl
> > code.
>
> Why not?  Some languages encourage unreadability, and perl is one of them.
> Then you have a language like python, that takes a readability enhancement
> like indentation and makes it part of the language - that's a language that
> _encourages_ readability.

I guess I tend to think of that as weakness in python, enforcing
formatting.  It just seems so cobol'esque.  I look at python code and
it just seems like reading run-on sentences.  And all the enforced
indentation in the world is useless when your line of code is longer
than your term window and it wraps.

Trust me, it's not like I don't understand where you're coming from.
There's too many people out there who make it damn hard to argue that
perl *can* be readable.

Besides, sometimes you get people coming up with clever ways to use
that unenforced formatting.
http://perl.4pro.net/perlish_coding_style.html

> Obviously you love perl.  You're welcome to it, but don't expect anybody to
> be recommending it in a thread about simple programming languages for
> students.

You say that as if it should rule out Perl.  Not so.  You can use Perl
in a very simple, shell-script style fashion, without knowing anything
advanced at all.  You don't need to know lots of different variable
types or declarations and memory management.  But when you're ready
for more, Perl can handle it.

I'm not actually intending to be argumentative.  I'm actually
intending to sit down and learn some Python one of these days.

- --
Andy Harrison
public key: 0x67518262
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