One of the things that impressed me the most when I came to know Perl was the fact that TIMTOWDTI. I'd recently been forced to write a 2000+ line web application in ADP (think ASP but using TCL instead of VB, ADP is part of the AOLserver offered at http://www.aolserver.com).

This was utterly disgusting to have to do, as I didn't know TCL at all and had to learn the language. The company I worked for was really big on TCL, even though I wanted to use any other language, like Perl or PHP.

After learning TCL and then learning Perl (which by no means am I done doing, there's still SO much to learn), I've noticed that TCL was much more simplistic. It wasn't exactly TIEOWTTI, but TAFWTDI (there are few ways to do it). In that sense, it was much more straightforward for a new coder.

I later discovered that this simplicity in TCL was why the company chose it over a language with more ways to do it (and hang yourself doing it). The code that I was working on would be put into production, and I'd be moved onto another project, another site, whatever - and someone would come along later to maintain it.

I'm not saying that someone else's Perl is necessarily less maintainable than someone's TCL code, but to be honest, it seems that languages with fewer ways to do things are good for cases where multiple people will be maintaining the code over the span of some years.

Just a few thoughts as to why fewer ways are sometimes nicer.

~Brian

In reply to Re: TIEOWTTI by brianarn
in thread TIEOWTTI by mnp

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