why ; ?

[Nick Sabalausky]

"Robert Fraser" <fraserofthenight at gmail.com> wrote in message 
news:fvu5k1$2gct$1 at digitalmars.com...
> Nick Sabalausky wrote:
>> Just because a large program *has* been written in such a language 
>> doesn't mean it's a good idea in general. I could write a large 
>> mission-critical program in Perl
>
> I know of at least one large (non-web) system written in Perl that was 
> servicing over 2 million users before being switched. Perl with "use 
> strict" and some good coding standards can be just as clean as any other 
> language. It's gotten a bad reputation because of its shell scripting 
> roots and use by web designers with limited programming experience.
>
> IMHO, Perl is a _lot_ easier to (write, read, maintain) than PHP. When I 
> was writing PHP for a resarch project, I found myself literally spending 
> hours tracing down bugs caused by typos in variable names, but a simple 
> "use strict;" in Perl fixes that completely.

Well, it was just an example. Perhaps a poorly chosen one. I'm really not as 
familiar with Perl as I am with others like PHP, VB*, Python, etc. Feel free 
to take "Perl" and insert "{name of some shitty language here}".

(Since you bring it up: as much as VBScript annoys the crap out of me, I 
find that I still prefer it to PHP for the sole reason that VBScript has 
"option explicit", fixing all those stupid hard-to-track-down typos. Not 
that PHP doesn't have it's advantages over VBScript in other areas, though. 
If they'd add a "use strict", I'd be flying a giant "PHP > VBScript" banner. 
At least for pre-.NET ASP anyway. Not sure how relevant that is now though. 
As for ASP.NET, well, I've been successfully avoiding web dev for awhile so, 
don't know, don't care ;) )