in reply to Re^3: the sad reality of perl
in thread the sad reality of perl

> People still use snippets from the internet that they don't understand, often it doesn't do what they expect and often someone else throws them a solution that they copy and paste without understanding what it does.

Interesting side-effect though is that copy/pasting of Python is harder because people often get the whitespaces wrong.

from the linked thread:

> Just to complete this, arzgi's script didn't work after copying and pasting from here. It took a while to work out, after a few PMs, that the spaces were not copied correctly.

Cheers Rolf
(addicted to the Perl Programming Language :)
Wikisyntax for the Monastery FootballPerl is like chess, only without the dice

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Re^5: the sad reality of perl
by stevieb (Canon) on Oct 12, 2018 at 01:35 UTC
    "Interesting side-effect though is that copy/pasting of Python is harder because people often get the whitespaces wrong."

    I am definitely not nearly as "advanced" in Python as I am with Perl (I still learn things in Perl daily so I still classify myself as ~intermediate), but this is the number one issue I find with Python folks who say they know what they are doing. See it a lot in helping newbs at work (along with the confusion of having multiple classes per file).

    I don't have anything against that at all as we are all new at some point with everything, but what does upset me is when a new employee (or prospect) claims "I'm an expert" and makes that hugely obvious mistake (whitespace issue). To me, it's akin to someone using Perl to perform one of our initial programming challenges but doesn't use use strict; or use warnings;.

      Not pretending to be an expert is unpythonic.

      (and logic is against the zen ;)

      Cheers Rolf
      (addicted to the Perl Programming Language :)
      Wikisyntax for the Monastery FootballPerl is like chess, only without the dice