On one level you're right. Languages are designed to fit with our personal understanding and methods of thought. The early programming languages took none of this into account, which made software design difficult at best. Most languages take the approach of, "The reason software design is difficult is that you're not using enough (functions|variables|comments|linguistic_names|classes|libraries). In truth, the reason programming is so difficult is that thinking is so difficult.

Most people have a prefered method of thinking and do not want to change that. Programming opens you up to new ways of thinking, and Perl opens you up the most because it encourages so many different ways of attacking a problem.

So in some sense, princepawn, you're also wrong. That's because if the language doesn't make sense to you, the programmer, the problem is with the programmer for being unwilling to adopt the language's mindset. And this is as true of Cobol as it is of Perl, although Perl definitly encouages more ways of thinking about a problem.

Princepawn, I feel like your view of the perl mindset is, "Whatever makes sense to my mind should be easy to describe in perl." You're claiming that you are the "enlightened" one and that it's perl's job to enlighten itself. In reality, each time you say, "This doesn't make sense to me-- someone else must have done this wrong," you move further away from understanding the true purpose of perl.

The true purpose of perl is to serve others, but it can only do this if you humble your mind. But much like enlightenment, I suppose that needs to be experienced, not explained.

-Ted

In reply to The Tao of Perl by tedv
in thread Apparent Inconsistencies in Perl Function Naming by princepawn

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":


  • Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!
  • Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.
  • Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.
  • Please read these before you post! —
  • Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:
    a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr
  • You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)
            For:     Use:
    & &amp;
    < &lt;
    > &gt;
    [ &#91;
    ] &#93;
  • Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?
  • See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.