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All the Perl that's Practical to Extract and Report
every Perl script that says:
"Don't be stupid."
--Larry Wall
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Re: (Score:1)
What silly complaints.
for ( @foo ){ print "$_\n" }is fine butprint "$_\n" for @foo;is not? The obfuscatory bit, if there is one, is Perl’s strange attractor, the$_.I never followed the argument that trailing control flow constructs are somehow obfuscatory. What kind of retard does someone have to be if they understand
if( $foo ) { bar( $baz ) }but is totally lost as soon as it’s writtenbar( $baz ) if $foo? I’m not using “retard” in the name-calling sense either; I mean that I believe that someone literally has to be mentally retarded to fail to understand the notion of modifiers. Even if someone has been writing nothing but C for the last 30 years, I don’t see how it is possible for them to fail to comprehend what’s going on.To me, frankly, the suggestion that modifiers are obfuscatory is condescending. The thought process seems to go something like “uh, yeah, okay; I’ve never seen this, it’s weird, though I guess I get it; but what if the next guy who comes along is total retard?”
I’ll never understand this.
In contrast, I’ve often wished I could name my iterator variable in the modifier form of
for(as well asmapandgrep) rather than having to use$_.Reply to This
The Mark of a Great Programming Language (Score:1)
Clearly the mark of a great programming language (if you're not a Lisp hacker anyway) is when a complete idiot who's never programmed before could maintain your code, not that that's pretty much the anti-pattern or anything.
(You should name your default variable
$itso everyone knows it's a pronoun.)renaming to $it (Score:2)
The problem with renaming $_ to $it is that many of the confused people will assume you mean the acronym IT and complain angrily when the variable doesn't meet their expectations!
Honestly, defending Perl against people whose impressions [joelonsoftware.com] of it were formed either by reading someone else's crappy code, or more commonly by reading the rantings of some dingdong who did so, is a FT job.
Re:renaming to $it (Score:1)
My rule is pretty simple. Any so-called programmer who can use a pronoun correctly in English has no business writing code if he can't use
$_correctly in Perl. (It's okay if you have to explain the similarity; it's not immediately obvious to people.)Re:renaming to $it (Score:2)
Re:renaming to $it (Score:1)
Re:renaming to $it (Score:1)
That's a fair point, as is the one about lexical declarations and postfix
if. I was thinking about the whiny won't someone please think of non-programmers argument about readability instead of legitimate implementation bugs.Re: (Score:1)
An entire paragraph written using “it” as the subject in every sentence isn’t very readable. There are good reasons to want to use a named iterator variable. Mind, I don’t think
$_is inherently obfuscatory and I have no qualms about using it, though I do consider each case carefully. If you’re iterating over a list returned directly from a somewhat complex expression, then a well-named iterator helps document intent. And there’s only one$_, so in those cases where needRe: (Score:1)
I agree. That also falls under my rule of "don't hire people who don't know what they're doing".
Re: (Score:1)