use Perl

• Re: (Score:1)

  by Aristotle (5147)

  What silly complaints. for ( @foo ){ print "$_\n" } is fine but print "$_\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 written bar( $baz ) if $foo? I’m not using “retard” in the name-calling sense either; I mean
  • The Mark of a Great Programming Language (Score:1)

    by chromatic (983)

    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 $it so everyone knows it's a pronoun.)
    • renaming to $it (Score:2)

      by lachoy (1663)

      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)

        by chromatic (983)

        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:1)

          by perrin (4270)

          The constant stream of bugs resulting from accidental changing of $_ inside a sub call are a pretty good argument against using it when you don't have to (i.e. outside of a map or grep).
          • Re:renaming to $it (Score:1)

            by chromatic (983) on 2006.01.09 16:28 (#45595) Homepage Journal

            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.

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