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All the Perl that's Practical to Extract and Report

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Let's face it, Perl *is* a scripting language 2 Comments More | Login | Reply /

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  • Well, what do I think a scripting language is? Despite my earlier assertion that I'm not really going to pay attention to any debates on the topic because truth be told, they bore me to hell, the fact is that I still have a mental model of what a scripting language is. That's a language which is suitable for writing smaller "glue" bits of code, but not larger systems.

    We're re-watching Coupling season one at the moment (the real one, from the BBC), and all of this reminds me of Jane's pronouncement: "

    • Which, in hindsight, disproves Joel’s dictum to Never Rewrite Code.

      No, it doesn’t. Joel wrote about this in one of his recent weblog posts, but I would have said the same thing even before he opined on this precise issue.

      Joel’s dictum is not to forever keep the code you have – it’s to never throw it all away to start from scratch. Couldn’t Mozilla have improved their codebase one module at a time? Did they need to junk the rendering engine and the UI library and the networking code and the profile manager and everything else at once? Not likely. Sure, it would have been more frustrating, on grand average, to painstakingly comb the kinks out of the bad codebase, than just start over from scratch. But it would likely have taken no longer, and in the meantime there would always have been working code.

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