Thanks for the link. Interesting article, but I don't feel that it explained Perl very well. It's such a generic description that it one could pretty much do a s/Perl/other language/g; and it would still be mostly accurate. Two big nits with the article:

...Perl stands for Practical Extraction and Reporting Language...

No, it doesn't. Perl doesn't stand for anything. The above acronym is just one that someone (who?) came up with and it attained the status of Urban Programming Legend.

The other nit is a huge one. Check out the program the author lists for generating HTML for displaying photos. Here's one of the choice lines of code that's listed:

print HTMLFILE "\<P\>\<a href\=\"http\:\/\/index.html\"\>Return to hom
+e page\<\/a\>\<\/font\>\n";
[download]

Yeah, that's going to make me want to run for the hills. Not only does the author use double quotes, forcing the escaping of embedded double quotes, she escapes many items that don't need to be escaped. Just glancing at that line will convince many programmers that Perl does indeed have too much punctuation. (nitpickers might notice that the double-quotes are superfluous since nothing is interpolated, but that's a minor point since Perl is smart enough to optimize this). Here's one way to write the above line:

print HTMLFILE '<P><a href="http://index.html">Return to home page</a>
+</font>\n';
[download]

Aah! Much cleaner. Of course, there are other problems in the code that we'd probably point out here:

• No strict
• No warnings
• Multiple prints instead of HERE docs
• Substituting out newlines instead of using chomp
• Useless switching out of variables: $htmlroot = $htmlroot1;
• Using a while loop with a counter and incrementing the counter
• Bad HTML
• Aack!!! I can't stand it any more!!!

There are more problems than those above, but I think you get the idea. Selling people Perl by writing bad Perl is a terrible way to go.

Cheers,
Ovid

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