Splitter quiz / survey

[Brad Roberts]

On Mon, 27 Apr 2009, bearophile wrote:

> Walter Bright:
> > Expect, yes, but Andrei made a good point that (4) is not the most 
> > useful behavior.
> 
> If your language acts in an intuitive and logic way, people need less time to write programs, to debug then, and write less bugs in the first place. This outweighs most other things. If you have to add a stripping it's not so bad.
> 
> 
> > Since Perl has been very successful in its niche of string processing, I 
> > would give a lot a weight to its behavior for basic functions.
> 
> Perl is now (correctly) dying because it looks like it was designed by an army of crazy monkeys. It was acceptable years ago, when there was no better alternative, but today it's better to look at other places for design ideas, at Python, Clojure, C#4, Haskell, Scala, Chapel, F#, Ruby.
> If you want to see a small design error that may be partially derived from Perl you can see std.string of Phobos1, the chomp and chop functions. They have too much similar names and they do to much similar things. So you often need a manual to remember what does what.
> I am not a compiler writer, but I am quite able to see what a mess Perl is. Perl is nearly never a good place to copy language design ideas from.
> 
> Bye,
> bearophile

Actually, perl is a risky language to take _syntax_ from, but _semantics_ 
aren't nearly as dangerous.  Obviously there's some semantics that are 
horrible (see it's OOP mechanisms), but parts of the rest are quite good.  
I grip and groan every time I find myself having to touch perl code, but 
it's rarely due to non-syntactical issues.

Later,
Brad