Hmm. I still think that misses the point. A person armed with only a Chinese-English dictionary won't be able to create a sensible text (to people fluent in Chinese). Whereas a program (write-only or otherwise) won't run correctly unless it is properly structured. In other words, you need to know Chinese before you can create it. And if you did know enough Chinese to create sensible sentences, and Chinese was a write-only language, then you would *still* have trouble reading what you wrote.

Or stated another way, "write-only" is a one-way process. To describe something as write-only you need to show it takes a disproportionate amount of time to decipher something, compared to the time it took to create it. The Chinese language isn't an example of this, because once you learn it, you'll be able to read it easily. An MD5 hash is an extreme example of the opposite. The process of creating the hash is simple, but turning a hash into a text is nearly impossible.

I'll leave the question of whether Perl is "write-only" to the philosophers, but comparing the "write-only" nature of something to unfamiliarity with Chinese is completely bogus since it tries to skirt the issue by redefining it.

In reply to Re^4: Perl for big projects by Anonymous Monk
in thread Perl for big projects by CountZero

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