[ruby-talk:7056] Re: Why do people think Perl is ugly? (Vent); was: Why isn't Perl highly orthogonal?

[e-mail] wrote:
: Since we're on the topic of public perceptions of Perl, I'd like to
: bring up something that's bothered me for quite a while.  Why is Perl so
: commonly described as "ugly" and "difficult"?  When I first needed to
: learn Perl I approached it with a sense of foreboding because I had been
: told many times about how ugly the language is.  One llama book and one
: camel book later I still hadn't gotten to the "ugly" part. Four years
: later I STILL haven't found the ugly part.

I just hit the perfect analogy for Perl vs. orthogonal languages.  Perl is
a blank canvas, a set of brushes, and a palette of oil paints.  Highly
orthogonal languages are an etch-a-sketch.

Consider that an unskilled, esthetically challenged artist will do nothing
but make a mess given the artistic tools to work with.  Lines will be
wrong, color choices horrid, forms muddled and warped.  Conversely, that
same person can, without any effort or training, use the etch-a-sketch to
produce a perfectly straight, perfectly even line, and with only a little
practice will be able to produce simple but very clean drawings consisting
of vertical and horizontal lines.

Of course, an artist will be horribly constrained by the etch-a-sketch,
and will be able to create beauty using the brushes and paint.

Perl can be quite ugly when misapplied, or profoundly beautiful when
wielded with skill and talent.  A 'diagonal language', indeed...

: I think a lot of the perception has something to do with regular
: expressions.

Regexes are a language within the language, of course.

: OK, I'm done venting.  This thread has just brought up the frustration I
: sometimes feel when I'm working in other languages and I miss the
: simplicity, conciseness and beauty of Perl.

Language arguments are usually silly.  To steal someone's analogy from the
other day, to answer 'which is faster, a porsche or a snowplow?', you need
to know something about the road conditions. :)

-- 
   |   Craig Berry - http://www.cinenet.net/~cberry/
 --*--  "The hills are burning, and the wind is raging; and the clock
   |   strikes midnight in the Garden of Allah." - Don Henley