On 2/8/14 4:08 PM, Arjun Ray wrote:
> But why blame Perl, other than it's the language eveyone loves to
> hate? (Actually, I thought that would be C++.)
>
>
I think it's because regexes (*real* perl regexes, not the pale
imitations purists refer to as "regular expressions") are so easy to
use, convenient, and powerful in Perl, unlike other languages (cough,
Java I'm looking at you). Python has them too (and Javascript - I
guess we have to include that now), but re's in these are not
first-class language constructs the way they are in Perl. Perl
practically cries out to the programmer "use regexes! I will give you
magically-scoped variables with all your capture groups. I will drive
your iteration using /g. Your program will be super compact! No more
RSI!" Who cares if your code is unreadable and undebuggable. If you're
sane, you'll use Perl primarily for one-time text-processing tasks.
I will confess to having built a complex account/subscription management
system including a web application in 1999 that is still in operation
today in Perl, that uses regexes to parse its templates, which are in a
homegrown subset of XML not too far from MicroXML that I stumbled into
using because I didn't bother to learn what XML syntax really required
to be parsed. I would never do this today, but the fact is the system
actually works fine. Several other people have had to learn it and
perform major updates, and this seems to go fairly smoothly. The
pseudo-XML templates in particular and their parser (HTML::Macro) have
never caused any trouble in the least. They are not used for
interchange with other systems, so standards are not really particularly
relevant, and besides they include potentially ill-formed HTML,
unescaped, something I never could have achieved with a *real* XML
parser. We fix them when we find them, but in the meantime, no real harm
is done. So I think there are places for parsing markup with (perl) regexes.
I do agree that Perl lends itself to confusing coding idioms, but at
least it doesn't have inheritance (not really). Java programmers I have
worked with seem to have become so deliriously enamored of formal
conventions ("patterns," they call them), that they tend to ignore the
actual problem at hand. "Ah wait!" they say, "here is an opportunity to
decorate the interface with a delegation facade!" Every language has its
pitfalls. C++, yes, very scary traps, but in the end I find that bad
taste knows no linguistic bounds. Bad programmers will be bad.
-Mike
