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chromatic (983)

chromatic
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Journal of chromatic (983)

Friday August 24, 2007
04:17 PM

Write Once Coders

[ #34211 ]

Perl is almost always used to create “write once code” and therefore ends up not being taken seriously as a modern web app development language...

Rodney Degracia, Little Cream Soda

For any language in which a reasonably skilled practitioner can distinguish between obfuscated and de-obfuscated code, it's the fault of the programmer if code is unreadable to anyone who actually knows the language.

The readability of a program is meaningless to people who don't know the language. Likely also the problem domain.

It's time to talk about write-only coders instead of write-only languages--at least if you actually care about quality software rather than having a sneering contest.


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  • s/read-only/write-only ?

  • Yes... but I already said that English was too difficult to write correctly [oreillynet.com]. Anyway, fixed now, thanks!

  • If you can't read code that your wrote then don't blame the language blame yourself. Perl gives you a pretty powerful gun. If you take that gun and shoot yourself in the foot that is your fault.
    • o/~ Perl 5 in a nutshell, no way is the right way to do it, it's so easy to write, but, it's not always easy to read, to read ... o/~
  • He does make a semi-point about Ruby. Rails is being built into the next version of OSX and the Ruby bridge to Objective-C is supposed to be really good. I don't agree about Ruby in the web space arena because there simple are little to no hosting companies that have Ruby as an option and certainly not RoR.
    • FWIW, the Perl bridge to Objective-C is also REALLY GOOD. In a way I'm glad it's not going to be shipped with the OS as that way I can update it outside of an official Apple update.

      There's nothing I haven't been able to do with it yet (though like every open source thing, the docs are somewhat lacking).
      • I did not mean to disparage CamelBones at all. I was only commenting on Ruby. I am firmly in the Perl camp though but haven't gotten around to CamelBones yet. I am assuming CamelBones here as that is the only one that "I" know about.
        • Yes, I know you didn't. But I'm trying to keep it in the forefront of people's minds as 10.5 comes out talking about scripting language bindings - CamelBones still works, and is a really amazing piece of work.
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