I’m not exactly the model programmer, but I’m a big nut on readable code.<\/p>\n
I’ve been doing a lot of PHP, but now I’m starting to get back into Perl. And I’m realizing that, in Perl, it’s very<\/em> easy to write code that makes absolutely no sense to anyone except the most seasoned veterans. It does a lot of what I occasionally chastize myself for doing: taking bizarre shortcuts that shave a few seconds off of writing the code, have no impact on performance, but make your code fairly hard to interpret.<\/p>\n I was trying to figure out how readline() works, for example (I shouldn’t have to look that one up), and they gave this example code block:<\/p>\n The very first line is odd: a for loop with no parameters. It’s easy enough to assume that it’s to do an infinite loop. The next line ensures that $! is undefined, $! being a variable pointing to errors. (Obviously. What else could $! mean?) The $line = <> is probably clear to anyone who knows Perl, though it’s certainly not intuitive as explicitly stating that it’s referring to STDIN. I find the unless() syntax to be nifty: it’s the same as if(!(…)), but a little clearer. Except I only find it intuitive if it’s expected that the evaluation will be true: unless a rare event happens… Here, it’s unless reading from STDIN is defined. <\/p>\n And even the die() bothers me: maybe there’s no sense in writing out an if($!) { die $! }, but I would have. <\/p>\n All around, I feel as if everything in Perl relies on very terse, bizarre naming schemes, and have always thought that a lot of Perl programmers take pride in writing the most obfuscated code imaginable. There are a lot of languages that I can “read” pretty well: I can sit down and look at your code and figure out what it does. But Perl isn’t one of them. Case in point: I’m scratching my head trying to make readline() read a line of data at a time. That’s what it’s supposed to do, but that’s not what it’s doing. Another time, a function returned an array full of references<\/i>, a fact that was buried somewhat obscure in the documentation. Don’t get me wrong: it’s a very powerful language, and some brilliant people have done some amazing stuff with it. But it doesn’t have the same beginner-friendliness that other languages do. The same could be said, I suppose, for vi or Linux. But I have lots of reasons why I think Linux and vi are much better than the alternatives. I don’t have any reason to think that Perl is any better than its numerous alternatives. (PHP, Ruby, Python, bash…)<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I’m not exactly the model programmer, but I’m a big nut on readable code. I’ve been doing a lot of PHP, but now I’m starting to get back into Perl. And I’m realizing that, in Perl, it’s very easy to … Continue reading \n for (;;) {\n undef $!;\n unless (defined( $line = <> )) {\n die $! if $!;\n last; # reached EOF\n }\n # ...\n }\n<\/pre>\n