in reply to Musing on Perl's "Just Try It" Amazingness

What continues to surprise me is how often (compared with other languages that I use regularly) Perl code I write works first time. This is even more surprising considering that Perl often looks more like line noise at first glance than well structured, intuitive and obvious code!

Perl is environmentally friendly - it saves trees
  • Comment on Re: Musing on Perl's "Just Try It" Amazingness

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Re^2: Musing on Perl's "Just Try It" Amazingness
by Erez (Priest) on Dec 13, 2007 at 10:05 UTC

    Perl often looks more like line noise at first glance than well structured

    So does every language, foreign, or not.
    To a foreigner it would look *like* a language, but an incomprehensible one.

    This is probably my second least favourite reference to Perl, right after "scripting language".

    Software speaks in tongues of man; I debug, therefore I code.

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[d/l]

      I should really (as I considered doing) have changed my sig back to "Perl is Huffman encoded by design" for that post.

      Line noise is generally considered random (although if needn't be). Conventionally written languages of any sort generally present some form of structure. It may be incomprehensible to the reader, but it looks like it does have meaning or at least a pattern.

      Perl on the other hand, especially in the small snippets you might find in one liners, can look almost like a random bunch of characters (line noise). That is more a function of Perl's succinct power than anything else.

      Perl is environmentally friendly - it saves trees
[reply]
Re^2: Musing on Perl's "Just Try It" Amazingness
by parv (Parson) on Dec 12, 2007 at 23:47 UTC
    "The devil is in the details."
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In Section Meditations