As for the interpreter guessing, well, it does not flip coins. There are deterministic rules, even if they’re not easy to determine for anyone other than the interpreter.

As for tie, autoloading, eval and the like, these are features – whether you consider them evil or not. Make a language without them, and you end up with an abstraction glass ceiling that you can look through but never get past – like Java. As a result, Java programs grow superlinearly with the number of features and functions they support, with absolutely no recourse unless you start adding preprocessors to the mix, which, as we all know, are evil (or something like that; the JVM’s source code itself contains multiple ones, but hey, do as they say, not as they do).

Heck, even Java overloads the meaning of + for String objects. It just doesn’t let you use that ability for your own code, because you’re a dumb lowly programmer and not to be trusted with dangerous tools. The result of that glass ceiling is that in order to restore some sanity, the language grows absurd insanities like generics. Funny, it’s starting to look as complicated as C++.

I’ll not say a word about the positively byzantine standard library.

Have you heard of the Waterbed Theory?

Makeshifts last the longest.

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

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