If 'cool' is too subjective, transient, and divisive; then feel free to substitute 'fun' in my original sentence, but you might loose that sense of novices looking on at what the masters do and wanting to emulate them.

Maintainance is enhanced by composability and the reduction of special cases - things that can be affected by language syntax.

I'm glad you brought up the IC design example, it enhances my argument. There are many ways to design your own transistor, AND gate, or flip-flop, but the digital designer is NOT given the choice. there are very few types of basic gates at his disposal and through the base uniformity, tested methods of (de/)composition, testing, and training in manufacturability, the designer is freed to make such advances.
On the quote by Brian W. Kernighan, It is about debugging which can be a part of maintenance and writing clever code. I mentioned some very clever coding practices above it. I still think its a fair quote. I am aware of the pitfalls of a poorly used quote back-firing but would rather modify what you said to "Mis-quoting smart people does not make one smart", which causes me to quote rarely :-)

I do not argue that assembler is more maintainable than C, and know that you never said that, it was part of one of your examples. I could however take the first sentence of your paragraph introducing the example to highlight some of our differences of opinion:

Perl's many idiomatic constructs allow the concise representation of a high level algorithm in an unnecessary number of sets of a few short statements.
Furthermore, this is seen as a good thing in the community. I think this goes against maintenance, as does "Do What I Mean" rather than "Do What I Say".


Here are two concrete Perl features that make it harder to maintain Perl programs, not un-maintainable, but definitely harder to maintain: 
 * The explicit use of references.
 * The method of passing of arguments into subroutines.
You can't mandate against their use in a style-guide and they can be used so deceptively that they get through code reviews.

- Paddy.

In reply to Re^7: Some thoughts around the "is Perl code maintainable" discussion by paddy3118
in thread Some thoughts around the "is Perl code maintainable" discussion by oyse

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