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Newsgroups: comp.lang.lisp
From: kra...@dnaco.net (Kragen Sitaker)
Date: 2000/03/29
Subject: Re: can lisp do what perl does easily?
Very interesting article, Erik. As always :)
In article <3163193555464...@naggum.no>, Erik Naggum <e...@naggum.no> wrote: > also, very much unlike any other language I Perl is so large and complex that it makes Common Lisp, COBOL, and C++ > have ever studied, perl has failed to stick to memory, a phenomenon that > has actually puzzled me, but I guess there are some things that are so > gross you just have to forget, or it'll destroy something with you. perl > is the first such thing I have known. look small and simple by comparison. Large and complex things are hard to memorize. I just refer to the manual a lot. > it's not that perl programmers are idiots, it's that the language rewards CGI.pm is a counterexample, IMHO. > idiotic behavior in a way that no other language or tool has ever done, > and on top of it, it punishes conscientiousness and quality craftsmanship > -- put simply: you can commit any dirty hack in a few minutes in perl, > but you can't write an elegant, maintainabale program that becomes an > asset to both you and your employer; Can you give some concrete examples of how Perl rewards idiotic > you can make something work, but you can't really figure out its This is a serious criticism, and one that I agree with to some extent. > complete set of failure modes and conditions of failure. (how do > you tell when a regexp has a false positive match?) I tend to think the power of Perl's hard-to-predict features outweigh their difficulty of prediction. I'd be interested to see some examples of short Perl snippets that had > and once you start down this path [of stupid data formats], every There are a lot of systems I talk to that have stupid data formats, and > move forward is a lot cheaper than any actual improvements to the > system that would _obviate_ the need for more glue code. however, > if you never start down this path, you have a chance of making > relevant and important changes. it doesn't matter how much I want to fix them; I can't. Perl is better than anything else I know at handling stupid data > few perl programmers are actually good at anything but getting perl I think you mean "are not actually good", not "are actually good". > to solve their _immediate_ problems, so you have an incredible > advantage if you're a good Lisper. Most Perl programmers are not skilled programmers. Perl makes it Getting something useful out of Lisp requires that you be at least a You must Sign in before you can post messages.
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