You find yourself bored at work sitting in front of a computer…
More boring programing stuff I’m affraid. Writing a web service in Perl at the moment. Doing objects in Perl is all very well and good “you need a deep understanding of the way objects work” they say smugly. But IMHO that’s just bollocks , the whole point of OO is that it’s an abstraction that makes it easier to write nice clean understandable code with simple syntax, Perl does all sorts of horible pointer gymnastics to ‘objectify’ its code (which has to happen anyway but it should be hidden from the user) but the syntax is ambiguous and convoluted (In Perl? shocker!). I’m going to get angry about lack of typing soon and I don’t know where that will lead so i’ll stop now.
So just to summarise and have some kind of point to this post, I think one of the aims in designing a programing language is to make it easy (or even *eek* necessary) to write neat, maintainable code, allowing for neat abstraction. Perl purposefully steers away from this for philosophical rather than practical reasons, with all sorts of implications for error checking, debugging and the development process in general. Basically Perl requires you to be disciplined in order to create something maintainable and readable, that stuff comes free with some other modern languages which put practicality first. Will you…
Now the guy who sits opposite me ‘TV guy’ wants to talk about Lost. Pretty rubbish really givent he amount of hype we’ve been subjected to, mind you, i only watched the first bit as they cut big brother into the middle of it and that lunatic Craig, having been evicted, was busy shredding his last scraps of dignity, and it proved literally unwatchable. I’ve done pretty well this year, only watched about 30mins of Big Brother in total, usually late at night just before giving up and going to bed. Need to stop thinking about this and go back to Perl. What will you do next?
k thnx bye.
And then Charlie said:
Mmm, pretty code, that’s an interesting one. I think Python looks pretty. All that forced whitespace. If PHP and Perl are 70s brutalist architecture, then Python is a sort of minimalist, slightly pretentious, interior design. Or maybe Art Deco, actually…all that white.
And then tom said:Yeah, things like Python and Ruby are kind of the anti-perl in those terms, C would certainly join Perl in the ’70s brutalist’ catagory, I think that Haskell would have to be the apotheosis of a Modern programing language. Not sure where Java would sit, my instincts say that it’s contemporary shopping mall architecture but I’m not sure why.
And then Charlie said:Nothing says shopping mall to me more than Visual Basic. It almost hums muzak at you whilst you wrestle with the mdf fascia of the whole thing.
And then lish said:I can take a vague interest in these sorts of posts now, while still not fully understanding them.
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