The Perils of Perl, Do we need to take away your keyboard? - Brian "Krow" Aker's Idle Thoughts

75% of the differences between C and Ruby is that Ruby forces you to do about 50% of what you should have been doing in C all along. The other 50% of what you should have been doing all along Ruby still doesn't force you to do. *coughCOMMENTScough*

Most of the rest of the differences are syntax streamlining, which is wonderful, but irrelevant to the point.

I don't know, I find even the most well structured Perl code (say, for example, LiveJournal's) to be difficult to read. But I'm not as good with the code reading in general as a lot of other coders are. When I buy a book on coding, I read the text and not the examples. I still find it more difficult than other languages though.

C would be my most readable by far. Everything is so plain and linear.

Obviously there are degrees of readability within any language, including C. But it is, imo, a fair bit more complicated than a perfectly relativistic scale.

I think there are different ways of thinking about code and different languages lend themselves to those different ways of thinking.

For example, I find functional languages like Haskell and Lisp to be downright unlegible, but there are clearly people who find them the easiest to read.

Add in to the mix that certain problem domains will probably attract certain types of thinkers, and I think that it's definitely fair to say that certain languages will tend to have poor readability to certain tasks in general. Exceptions abound as with anything, of course.

I distinctly remember looking at someone's C code where they had named a variable momentaryLapseOfReason.

I asked the guy what that was all about, and if I remember correctly, it was because the variable was used as a tokenizer or parser or whatever, and sometimes it didn't parse the tokens just right, even if there was nothing wrong with the input, so that was what the variable was named.
After this, I find Perl quite readable.

Oddly, despite being a Java developer who can write C under duress, I find C++ to be cryptic most of the time.

Wonder no more!

It was Geomorphology code, of course. It read in comma-delimited files as I recall. It was a rather unsettling variable name at the time.

I'm sad to say I mostly agree. Sad because I've been writing perl for probably 10 years, off and on, and I'm in love with it. Perl is the flexible and curvaceous mistress of the coder and sysadmin, but for large, complex projects it feels unwieldy. Even the perl greats like Randall Schwartz have code that takes me way too long to figure out even when I already know what it does. That's mitigated by adherence to standards like the "perl best practices" advice by Damion Conway, but too few people actually code to any standard. Sloppy code is, many times, avoidable and not the real issue. I think the author states that perl is good for a lot of scripts and system administration.

When programs become large and complex, however, even good style can't keep up with good consistent, logical, built in object orientation. OOP in perl feels like OOP in C. It can be done and it's not super complex, but it isn't natural either. Perl OOP articles have sections on how to trick perl into doing what you want such as making object internals private: you create inside out classes and anonymous hashes or you scramble the names of the internal variables outside of the class namespace so no one can find them. Yikes! I think my epiphany came when I was writing (attempting to write) an object oriented asynchronous event handler. I had some abstract classes thought out and started to code them and thought "Jeez, this would be easier in C++". At that point I dusted off a Python book that had been sitting unread for too long and started in on it. I hear good things about Ruby too, so that's next.

May I ask: when you aren't coding in lower level languages like C or C++ what scripting language(s) do you use?

I find perl OOP works pretty well, and I have tried to keep large perl projects on track by using OOP concepts (even when I write C code, it is fairly OOP like).

You might be interested in the response thread on chromatic's post, and also my two responses elsewhere, which are also somewhat clarifying. We had some interesting conversations, myself and a few folks who blog on use.perl.

And for reference, Bugzilla currently isn't moving away from Perl, although it was an extremely enlightening research process.

-Max