use Perl

• 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:2)

        by TeeJay (2309) on 2008.12.04 15:00 (#66234) Homepage Journal

        I've friends who work in bioinformatics, they write Perl, most of it is pretty good, some of them come to Perl Workshops, and the some of the people they work with even give talks at Perl Workshops.

        Not all of the people they work with are good, but there is the community and the support there. If the technical people in your organisation are more interested in petty squabling about languages than helping their own people do their job better by hooking them up with the local perl or bio-perl comminity, that doesn't just show how partisan they are, it shows how unprofessional they are.

        As much as I like perl, I don't think I could ever be bothered to follow a link from reddit, and join a message board or blog about python, php or even ASP just say how crap it was, and I've dealt with pencil-in-the-eye coding in all of those languages.

        The only reason I bother to join in here, is because it's a journal site I use regularly and suddenly a bunch of python zealots appear and start kicking off.

        --
        
        @JAPH = qw(Hacker Perl Another Just);
        print reverse @JAPH;

        Reply to This

        Parent