An interesting observation

[Robert Fraser]

Bruno Medeiros Wrote:

> Gregor Richards wrote:
> > BCS wrote:
> >>
> >> http://www.sysprog.net/quotcob.html
> >>
> >> Historically, languages designed for other people to use have been 
> >> bad: Cobol, PL/I, Pascal, Ada, C++.
> >> The good languages have been those that were designed for their own 
> >> creators: C, Perl, Smalltalk, Lisp. (Paul Graham)
> >>
> >> can we add D to this list?
> >>
> >>
> > 
> > I flatly disregard any quote which qualifies Perl as a "good language."
> > 
> >  - Gregor Richards
> 
> Same here.
> 
> -- 
> Bruno Medeiros - MSc in CS/E student
> http://www.prowiki.org/wiki4d/wiki.cgi?BrunoMedeiros#D

Perl is a brilliant language when it's used as it was designed. For hacking out quick scripts, Perl has a far better syntax than shell scripts (for any shell I know of) and is portable. I even write my "makefiles" in Perl, since the syntax is cleaner than Ant and more portable and flexible than Make, and almost all my projects have inline Perl somewhere in them (including Descent; yes I'm polluting the D world with my evil Perl-y ways).

On the other hand, last summer at my internship I was working with a legacy Perl system of 1.5 million lines of Perl. They had some strict coding standards, so the code wasn't entirely unreadable, but it was still pretty ugly. And how Perl became the de-facto language of web development for so many years I can't see.