You have to take the Jargon File with a bit of salt. While it's been around for a long time, the most recent/popular version has been edited/addedto/maintained by Eric Raymond (esr). While esr has contributed greatly to OSS (Cathedral and Bazaar), he was an earlier adopter of python and in his zeal to support python, he's been critical of perl.

-derby

Update: You can read esr's side here.

Update again: From esr's article:

``More than one way to do it'' lent flavor and expressiveness at a small scale, but made it significantly harder to maintain consistent style across a wider code base. And many of the features that were later patched into Perl to address the complexity-control needs of bigger programs (objects, lexical scoping, ``use strict'', etc.) had a fragile, jerry-rigged feel about them.

We need a term similar to truthiness for this ... I suggest robustiness. Doesn't matter what the benchmarks say ... since the code feels more robust then it is, in fact, more robust.

In reply to Re: How do you define "elegant"? by derby
in thread How do you define "elegant"? by Mutant

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