On 5/27/11 10:55 PM, John Doty wrote:
My intro to Perl was about 20 years ago, when one of my Japanese colleagues asked me to bring a couple of copies of the Perl book over, because it was unavailable in Japan. So, I bought them at Quantum Books. I read one of them on the long plane flight. My impression then is the same as it is now: Perl is a crazy, complex, undisciplined shotgun marriage between AWK and sh. The contrast between the extreme discipline of AWK's design and Perl's sloppiness is striking.
I share your opinion of Perl. There's no doubt of its power, but it's a sloppy, disgusting mess that almost always results in completely opaque and unmaintainable code.
Sure, it is possible to write good code in Perl, but almost nobody does, because the language doesn't encourage writing good code, and the almost cultlike culture surrounding it largely doesn't recognize it.
And I've written code in dozens of languages (I lost count decades ago). I won't recommend FORTRAN II, METASYMBOL, SNOBOL3, PL/I, or FORTH for this job ;-)
I think we should consider Intercal. Or perhaps DCL. =)This is my opinion, speaking as a professional developer of both hardware and software: Scheme was a good choice for gEDA, and it should be left alone. The chosen implementation of Scheme, guile, may not be the best tool for the job right now, but the language is.
There will always be people who don't like a particular choice. That's true of anything. All changing it will accomplish is changing who is pleased and who is disgusted.
-Dave
--
Dave McGuire
Port Charlotte, FL
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