QOTD

[geekchick]

nminusone may appreciate this, judging from the twitching that ensued when I forced him to look at some perl code. From the Tour de Babel, found via a link from Coding Horror:

There are "better" languages than Perl — hell, there are lots of them, if you define "better" as "not being insane". Lisp, Smalltalk, Python, gosh, I could probably name 20 or 30 languages that are "better" than Perl, inasmuch as they don't look like that Sperm Whale that exploded in the streets of Taiwan over the summer. Whale guts everywhere, covering cars, motorcycles, pedestrians. That's Perl. It's charming, really.

But Perl has many, many things going for it that, until recently, no other language had, and they compensated for its exo-intestinal qualities. You can make all sorts of useful things out of exploded whale, including perfume. It's quite useful. And so is Perl.

The author seems to like Ruby, which I suppose I might as well look at one of these days in the interests of keeping my brain from rusting. Someone on That List[tm] has been singing its praises for years, but it's not been high up on my priority list to spend any time on it.

Comments

[marnanel.livejournal.com]

I think the Camel Book says, "On the other hand, the camel has not evolved to smell good."

[quasigeostrophy.livejournal.com]

Mmmmmm... ambergris. ;-)

[nminusone.livejournal.com]

With Perl, it's not that the intestines have exploded, it's that they're still very much intact but the programmer has wedged hir head into a place where sie can see their contents in situ.

Heh sorry, that was too obvious *not* to say.

Honestly I don't care what languages other people use, unless it affects me somehow. (Alas it often does, whether as a maintanance issue or due to their part of the system being late/broken/crap.) I got over my "computer language as relgion" phase at 14, when I learned my *second* computer language.

[brian1789.livejournal.com]

I'll keepth my Lisp, thankth... ;)

[redknight.livejournal.com]

"Perl is like vice grips. You can do anything with it, and it's the wrong tool for every job." (author unknown)