From: Adam Sroka <adam.s@...>
Date: 2005-12-16T14:18:11+09:00
Subject: Re: regular expressions question

Ryan Leavengood wrote:
> On 12/15/05, Neil Stevens <neil@hakubi.us> wrote:
>   
<<bunch of snipped stuff about rudeness and such>>

I'm kind of new here, but it seems like debating the quality of one 
another's rudeness is slightly OT.

Incidentally, I earned my living as a back-end Perl programmer for a 
couple years early in my career. I wrote literate OO code in Perl. The 
thing I loved about Perl was that, like a natural language, there were 
several ways to say the same thing some obvious, some flowery, some a 
bit too terse. Among the things I did *not* like about Perl were some of 
the whacky implicit variables like $1, etc, and especially @_. However, 
I never needed to use them explicitly, because when I wanted them they 
were always there implicitly (Those who know Perl know what I am saying.)

My point is this: I am (or was) a Perl programmer and I do not like the 
"Perlish" syntax one bit. I didn't like it in Perl, and I don't like it 
in Ruby either. However, I object to the notion that Perlishness makes 
it offensive. Non-obviousness is what makes it offensive. The matcher 
syntax is much clearer.