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

[Derek Broughton]

Andy Harrison wrote:

> 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...

Damn.  Now I don't feel so clever - I thought I'd have to explain that :-)  
(I did - but not to you, which is what counts!)  You got the point exactly.

> I guess I tend to think of that as weakness in python, enforcing
> formatting.  It just seems so cobol'esque.  

It does, but I used to work in COBOL in the days when COBOL was just going
free-form, and I used to force my teams to format: not "'x' goes in
column 'n'", but at least with indentation and one period per paragraph.

> I look at python code and 
> it just seems like reading run-on sentences.  

I guess anybody can program badly :-)  That's the same way I tend to think
of perl.

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

I like that - a lot.  I tend to code that way myself, but the leading
semicolons were a suprise :-)
> 
>> 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.

Sure you can, but I'm a firm believer in limiting the ways the beginner can
screw up, and I just feel perl makes it too easy to shoot yourself in the
foot.
-- 
derek