in reply to Re^4: Golf Challenge: FizzBuzz
in thread Golf Challenge: FizzBuzz

Who cares anyway?
Managers who are selecting technologies care.

People who make their living selling corporate america the idea that Perl is a strong architecture choice care.

So, yes, it matters to me. When the discussion of "Perl vs $other_tech" comes up, and the discussion quickly (and I mean very quickly) devolves to "Oh, Perl is unreadable", and they point to JAPHs and Golf because that's google-able, my heart saddens a bit. Even if we've lost the battle for entirely the wrong reasons, we still lost.

-- Randal L. Schwartz, Perl hacker

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Re^6: Golf Challenge: FizzBuzz
by blazar (Canon) on Mar 03, 2007 at 17:18 UTC

    All good points, but personally I think that there are other "reasons" why managers who are selecting technologies may prefer $other_tech to Perl, and they are reasons only in double quotes because they're all mostly related to FUD and misinformation anyway, so that activities like Obfu and Golf may be rather contribute to the phenomenon or be taken as an excuse for the "Oh, Perl is unreadable" pseudo-argument and I don't know how much they would weight in the overall bad reputation that Perl gets in some circles. I expect that the tons of examples alleged to be productive code but sporting bad programming habits that lie around in the net are much worse in this sense. OTOH that unreadable code is google-able doesn't mean that readable one is not: indeed it's easy to show that the latter overnumbers the former by large. If that is their argument, it's easy to counter it.

[reply]
      You're using rational arguments against irrational behavior. It doesn't matter. I'm telling you what the irrational behavior is. People who should know better disproportionally point at Golf and Obfu. That's the sad reality. I'm not saying that if all Golf and Obfu were eliminated, people would flock to Perl in the masses, but they're by far the leading candidates for discrediting Perl. It makes my job very hard.

      And this is a bit ironic, since I invented the JAPH, so I've effectively created my own worst enemy here. {grin}

      -- Randal L. Schwartz, Perl hacker

[reply]
        I'm not saying that if all Golf and Obfu were eliminated, people would flock to Perl in the masses, but they're by far the leading candidates for discrediting Perl. It makes my job very hard.

        Well I guess there's no reliable, undebatable, objective data to either confirm or disprove your claim...

        And this is a bit ironic, since I invented the JAPH, so I've effectively created my own worst enemy here. {grin}

        ...so ++ at least for this last funny remark, if not for anything else! BTW: it's already a .sig of mine now...

        (This is a rewrite of the node as it was posted in the first place, that better conveys the intended sense. The version of the node prior to the rewrite is pasted hereafter, in <spoiler> tags.)

        <Reveal this spoiler or all in this thread>
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