Perl incompetence
2000-04-22 18:16:23+00 by
Dan Lyke
4 comments
Aaargh! Just have to vent. I'm working through some godawful Perl code. Some people say Perl![[Wiki]](/adbanners/lookingglass.png)
lends itself to this, but I'm not so sure. I think that the real problem is that most people writing in this language are like native speakers of swahili trying to write the great American novel. Please, if you're going to pass yourself off as a programmer on some poor unsuspecting overfunded bay area startup, take the time to learn the bloody language you'll be implementing your con-job in! Please, those of us who have to pick up after your incompetence are begging!
[ related topics:
Perl
]
comments in ascending chronological order (reverse):
#Comment made: 2002-02-21 05:29:55+00 by:
Mike Gunderloy
Personally, I've always found that other people's hopelessly convoluted and unmaintainable code makes a great excuse for billing as many hours as I'd care to on any given job.
#Comment made: 2002-02-21 05:29:55+00 by:
Dan Lyke
Yeah, me too, but there comes a time in a career when it's just no longer fun to pick up after people who linearly search associative arrays rather than using the fact that the language encourages direct subscripting of said arrays by key value.
Perl is a wonderfully elegant language if you're not trying to write as though it were BASIC, and the point to using it is that it has all these great ways to express basic idioms rather than having to explicitly code them.
Oh well, as more than one person has said recently, quite often we're getting paid [mumbledy] dollars a minute to keep a straight face.
#Comment made: 2002-02-21 05:29:55+00 by:
TC
Hmmm sounds like a wise man/woman Dan. Yes keeping a straight face is something that takes practice and work but it also does wonders for fueling megalomania :)
Somone recently told me that Perl is poetry. I would say that Perl is more akin to english. It can become poetry in the hands of Burns or Longfellow but not in the hands of Jed Clampet.
Hmmmm I wonder what Robert Burns would say if he had to edit some of Jed Clampet's prose ...giggle...
#Comment made: 2002-02-21 05:29:55+00 by:
other_todd
I adore Perl more than any other computing language, but then I adore wordplay and semantic games. I'm not sure, but I think the two stem from the same place.
I have noticed that, of all the languages I've written in, Perl is the one where I am most concerned about the equivalent of idiom - personal style, and tics in the way you write things. If I inherit some C code from you, I don't really care how you structured a particular loop, or what manner of indentation you used. But in Perl if you didn't do it the way I like to do it I will rewrite the whole thing. Perl is personal, but I'm not sure exactly why.