use Perl

• Perl is weirder (Score:1)

  by jinx+ (1681)

  I remember Steve asking a list at work how to do a recursive find/replace on a file tree with Perl since he barely knew a lick of it. He got 3 answers. He picked the worst, most verbose, and hardest to use as the best choice. This was also during a time when Steve's dev group was foisting a horrible Java piece of crap on the customer service department which took 18 months to reach 25% of the coverage of the previous command line C and Perl tools it was supposed to replace; it was also too slow to use half

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  -- 120 chars should be all we're allowed for epitaphs as well.
  • Too Easy! (Score:1)

    by chromatic (983)

    He picked the worst, most verbose, and hardest to use as the best choice.

    It is practically impossible to teach good programming to students that have had a prior exposure to Java: as potential programmers they are mentally mutilated beyond hope of regeneration.
    • Re:Too Easy! (Score:1)

      by grink (8549) on 2008.05.12 17:50 (#62829) Journal

      Speaking from personal experience, coming from a Java/C-style strict typing background and moving into Perl CAN be very difficult.
      
      Essentially you feel _guilty_ for not ensuring everything is of the "right" type instead of "going with the flow".
      
      Combine type paranoia (will the code combust at runtime if I don't pin down every detail?!) with a penchant for over-engineering problems and you have the recipe for a very unpleasant, overly-verbose muck-up.
      

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      • Re: (Score:1)

        by chromatic (983)

        Hey, I switched from Java to Perl too, mostly because I compared how much work it was to send mail from Java in 1998 with how easy it was to send mail from the shell, and then decided to use something slightly more cross-platform than whatever the default shell was on HP-UX 9.