Is that why Java is the most popular language on the planet?

Define "popular". I'd bet there are far more lines of COBOL out there. Probably Fortran, too, which is still actively used for heavy-number-cruching in scientific applications (do you have any idea how fast a Fortran program running on MS-DOS 6 goes on a GHz system?).

I sense that you have no intention in being funny, but such "terse things" is exactly what turns off many people to Perl.

And not being able to do "terse things" is exactly what turns other people off to Java. Not just Perl programmers, either, but a lot of C++ diehards.

And not being able to do "terse things" is exactly what turns other people off to Java. Not just Perl programmers, either, but a lot of C++ diehards.

Have you looked at .Net source? There's not a lot of difference between the two languages. In fact if you really examine the changes in Java 1.5 you can see where it's incorporating much of .Net's functionality. No matter how you dice it, the majority of large scale application development will not be "terse".

coreolyn

"large scale application development will not be terse".

They are not terse because that is the way they are written. They are large because they are large. They could be small. They could be medium sized. Consider the Tau.

A lot of enterpise apps could be simplified by reducing them to datastructures and event handlers, but they tend to sprawl. They have multiple interfaces where they could add multiplexors to simplify things. All things can be simplified with time, and "large scale" doesn't mean "scaleable", "powerful", or "advanced", or even "feature rich" -- it just means "large scale". Consider the Tau.

The language is evolving. But you still need to deal with classes and types. That turns off people who want to not write business oriented stuff, but algorithms, i.e. matrix transforms.

Play that funky music white boy..

Is that why Java is the most popular language on the planet?

Having said that, java puts off a lot of people.

Also, declaring how popular a language is, w/o some sorta statistics or backup, since that's what you are claiming, isn't very convincing. I can retort easily, "ASM is most used." But we'd get into a "yes it is." "no it's not".

I sense that you have no intention in being funny, but such "terse things" is exactly what turns off many people to Perl. You need to do your homework.

You cannot do terse things like complex sorting in say, 3 lines.

Please, don't read more into my posts than what I've literally said. If I wanted to say all, or 40%, or some specific number, I would have.

I sense that you have no intention in being funny, but such "terse things" is exactly what turns off many people to Perl.

This, to me, is like saying that contractions are more efficient, but that's precisely why people don't like them. Computer languages are always going to be more terse than the exact descriptions of what the code would do. What's wrong with maximising what you can do with X lines of code, if that code's going to require understanding anyway?

I realize you may be talking about this in the hypothetical, that this doesn't turn you off to Perl -- but you say it as though you sympathize. Can you explain this to me?

Some poeple don't like contractions, saying they are "unprofessional". I work at a nonprofit that has members that serve a specific scientific discipline, and if we use a contraction anywhere on our website, we get e-mails and phone calls. I slam my head into the keyboard every time I hear it, but I go ahead and remove it all.

I find this quite odd, as in all of my college-level writing courses, we were encouraged to use contractions. Most of my company's members tend to be relatively old, so this could be a more recent movement in the language.

----
I wanted to explore how Perl's closures can be
manipulated, and ended up creating an object
system by accident. -- Schemer

: () { :|:& };:

Note: All code is untested, unless otherwise stated

I've often wondered about this. What, precisely, "turns off" someone about having shorthand notation for things?

There are a lot of things businesses and people in general look at when trying to figure out what language to program things in. One of the major concerns is whether or not code can be maintained. Part of this is readability. Readability can go down dramatically if you're trying to understand the code of someone who likes to use "slick tricks"

A good example of this is "magical" functions and variables, i.e. $_, @_, split, print, tr///, s///, //, etc.... Sometimes it makes a lot of sense to use the shorthand form (i.e. shift; instead of my $foo = shift (@_);) Other times it makes code confusing and errors hard to catch.

This is not to say that languages that support terseness are bad (it's mostly the way people use "contractions", as you called them). But because with some languages such terseness is not possible, obfusication becomes hard, and the readibility goes up. The silly thing about all of this is if coding standards were implemented so that readable code was created, languages where terseness was possible would be used more (IMHO). But that's some people for you -- instead of allowing coders bend and break the rules when it is good to do so, all rule bending/breaking is verboten. Go figure.

But because with some languages such terseness is not possible, obfusication becomes hard, and the readibility goes up.

Yes, but that's really my question -- why are people willing to endure "hardness" in spoken or written English, but not in code?

No one would seriously suggest that people stop using contractions or acronyms. NASA is easier than National Aeronautics and Space Administration, but nobody begrudges the use of the term. Why is $_ different?

Which is a misleading question -- it's not different at all in concrete terms so I guess the question should really be why do people think about them differently?





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You are what you think.