use Perl

• Quote (Score:2)

  by jdavidb (1361)

  how do you tell when a regexp has a false positive match?

  Well, I don't know. Could it be that your inability to tell reflects more on you than the language?

  Got that far and gave up since it was clear the man described himself sitting around stuck on problems not knowing what to do because he was inexperienced, and attributed it to the language.

  --
  J. David works really hard, has a passion for writing good software, and knows many of the world's best Perl programmers
• Relevance... (Score:2, Insightful)

  by Terje Bless (758)

  Note that while that message was apparently posted in 2000, Erik's antipathy for Perl and his original rant on the subject dates back several years previous AFAIK (I wouldn't be surprised if 1996 or 1997, or even earlier, were the case). It also presupposes that only one set of values and goals are valid.
  • Re:Relevance... (Score:1)

    by chromatic (983)

    It also presupposes that only one set of values and goals are valid.

    That, to me, is a reasonable critique of many things that come out of MIT, Lisp among them.

    I'd like to think that I'm a force for quality, maintainability, and sanity in coding in the Perl community, so I do appreciate elegance and correctness in code. Still, it's most important to get the job done. If that means writing a one-liner I'll never use again, so be it.
• What people don't understand ... (Score:2, Interesting)

  by johanvdb (1872)

  What people don't understand, they destroy.
  
  Let's face it, Perl is not the easiest language to master in a correct way. It is a natural language and in that sense, it gives a lot of freedom to do stuff.
  
  People with a sysadmin background often use Perl as their first step into 'real' programming. Most of these will keep their shell style scripting habits, but wrap them in a Perl syntax. Eagerly using the extra features they find, especially hashes.
  
  Other IT bonzos that come from an OO background will not app
• maintainable and scalable (Score:2)

  by TeeJay (2309)

  I have worked on several very large perl code-bases, I am currently working on avery large code base.

  It is being refactored and like any code that was developed up to 4 years ago it is a bit rough around the edges, but with Test suites, log4perl, SQL Phrasebooks, Autodia generated API documentation, Good use of modules, and templates to seperate code from presentation it is fairly managable

  It will be even more managable once we finish moving all the suitable SQL into the phrasebook and refactor out the

  --
  
  @JAPH = qw(Hacker Perl Another Just);
  print reverse @JAPH;
• one point (Score:2)

  by wickline (135)

  As I read that rant, the 'Big Problem' with perl is that it makes it easy to work with bad data (particularly poorly-formated data), and so perl programmers will tend to work with bad data rather than working to change whatever process produced the bad data so that they can work with good data.
  
  Suppose I grant that it is a flaw to work with bad data rather than to work to fix the process which produced that data. Suppose further that I grant that there is a correlation between languages which allow programm