use Perl

• Language as a guide towards intuition (Score:1)

  by Aristotle (5147)

  Nice writeup, and well put.

  Another point that I would have made is: often, novices structure code in weird ways, with procedures that aren’t very useful outside the context in which they were conceived because they are big and do too many things. They use variables that get recycled over too many intermediate calculations, or conversely fail to break calculations into intermediate steps saved in variables.

  Naming is a good detector for such problems. If you can’t think of a good precise name
  • foreign language variable names (Score:1)

    by mr_bean (3802) on 2007.03.17 3:00 (#53844) Journal

    I read in a software engineering textbook about a South African software company that went broke, because its code had been written by Portuguese speakers, who used Portuguese for their variable names. The Portuguese programmers left the company, and were replaced by Afrikaans-speaking ones, who couldn't maintain the code, because they couldn't understand Portuguese.
    
    I found this hard to believe, but I've never had the experience.
    The textbook writer, from South Africa, said names must be in English.
    
    I was thinking about the problems of non-English speaking programmers in connection with jonasbn's journal
    
          Linkname: Presentations, Papers Articles and Jokes
          URL: http://use.perl.org/~jonasbn/journal/32678 [perl.org]
    
    I have problems remembering the differences between 'split', 'splice', and 'slice', because the names are so similar. Do people who don't know those words have fewer problems, or more?

    Reply to This

    Parent