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• declining average quality of Perl LOC written (Score:1)

  by mkc (8947)

  (Disclaimer: I'm a Perl apostate.) You seem to be saying that competent Perl programmers are scarce and growing scarcer. It's also non-disputable that huge amounts of Perl code are being written every year. It would seem to follow that the average quality of Perl written over time has been falling, and anecdotally that's exactly what I'm seeing. For at least the last five years, the Perl that crosses my desk has been uniformly godawful--much poorer in quality than the first program I wrote as a kid. Ra
  • Re: (Score:2)

    by TeeJay (2309)

    confirmation bias much ?

    I think those who *do* care about quality have got on with it, that's why we have some seriously good tools for to help code quality, in every area from profiling, to perl critic to unit tests, to smarter refactoring editors : whether using perlisense or other tools inside vi or emacs, or using Padre, Kephra, Komodo or Eclipse.

    I care about quality, and Perl has delivered, everything from 2 generations of ORM that beat anything available from other dynamic languages, to CPAN modules w

    --
    
    @JAPH = qw(Hacker Perl Another Just);
    print reverse @JAPH;
    • Re: (Score:1)

      by mkc (8947)

      Re confirmation bias: No, what I see is clear cut. Better to argue instead that my case is not representative. I work in bioinformatics, and the Perl is pretty uniformly awful--mostly written by biologists I suppose. (When I say "awful", I don't mean "unimaginative" or "not what I would have done", I mean "poke your eyes out and run screaming".) Now, it may not be Perl's fault that a large number of people writing it are not competent, but that doesn't change the fact that randomly sampling Perl code, p
      • Re:declining average quality of Perl LOC written (Score:1)

        by btilly (5037) on 2008.12.04 20:25 (#66258) Journal

        As has been noted, bioinformatics has a lot of non-programmers programming in Perl. IIRC, average salaries in bioinformatics is less than what you see in other areas of Perl. The two phenomena are likely related, and both will lead to lower average code quality.

        Incidentally the quality of the Perl code that I've personally been seeing over the years has been going up, not down. That's because as my career has advanced I've been working with more experienced groups of competent people. While this is a good thing for me, I'm not sure that it is good in general. Because I also see that the kinds of people who used to write crap Perl CGI programs are now writing crap PHP systems. And sure, most of the PHP being written is bad, but if you get enough people using it widely enough, PHP is eventually going to grow its own circle of competent people.

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