Re^3: Worth still to learn perl 5?

Oh, I am not scared of learning it it, I like learning things. It just seems that one of the more common (or at least the more valid) criticisms of Perl is that its encouragement of highly individualistic coding styles makes collaborative development more difficult; and it seems that the response to that with Perl 6 is: "Oh yeah, you think that was something? Well get a load of this!"

It's like the TIFF spec, I'm pretty sure that a random string of bytes has about a 50% chance of being a valid TIFF file, which makes writing a parser for the format quite a PITA.

Comment on Re^3: Worth still to learn perl 5?

Replies are listed 'Best First'.
Re^4: Worth still to learn perl 5? by duff (Parson) on Dec 29, 2004 at 18:04 UTC
(Perl's) encouragement of highly individualistic coding styles makes collaborative development more difficult You know, I've always thought statements like this one rather curious. Just because perl allows the programmer to be expressive doesn't mean that it encourages it. The whole point of the TMTOWTDI motto is to remind programmers that they needn't be constrained by one mode of thought, not that they should strive to do things in as many ways as they can think of. In any collaborative coding effort there are guidelines (either implicit or explicit and sometimes even evolved) for contribution. These guidelines are social conventions, not technological. Perl's ability to let the programmer code in a multiparadigmatic manner isn't going to affect collaborative development at all except to make it easier. Where else could a few programmers each with expertise in a different programming language all collaborate in a meaningful/useful way but on a perl project? duff	[reply]

Replies are listed 'Best First'.

Re^4: Worth still to learn perl 5?
by duff (Parson) on Dec 29, 2004 at 18:04 UTC

(Perl's) encouragement of highly individualistic coding styles makes collaborative development more difficult

You know, I've always thought statements like this one rather curious. Just because perl allows the programmer to be expressive doesn't mean that it encourages it. The whole point of the TMTOWTDI motto is to remind programmers that they needn't be constrained by one mode of thought, not that they should strive to do things in as many ways as they can think of.

In any collaborative coding effort there are guidelines (either implicit or explicit and sometimes even evolved) for contribution. These guidelines are social conventions, not technological. Perl's ability to let the programmer code in a multiparadigmatic manner isn't going to affect collaborative development at all except to make it easier. Where else could a few programmers each with expertise in a different programming language all collaborate in a meaningful/useful way but on a perl project?

duff

[reply]