[Discuss] Interpreters vs Compilers

[Darren Duncan]

At 8:31 PM -0700 3/13/08, Deryk Barker wrote:
>I'll grant you superiority in handling regular expressions, but I 
>would suggest that for anything over 50-100 lines perl becomes 
>unwieldy - and rapidly unreadable.

I would suggest that this is way off base.

The readability or non-readability of code is mainly due to the 
programmer, not the language.  Sure, some languages are exceptions to 
this, meaning it simply isn't possible to make easily maintainable 
code in it, but Perl is not one of those.

I for one have written Perl programs tens of thousands of lines long 
and they are still easy to understand and maintain even after I 
haven't looked at them for years; easy for both myself and for other 
people.

Of course, I optimize for maintainability no matter what language I program in.

But the fact I am doing it in Perl with little hassle, and likewise 
are many other people, speaks to contradict what you said about Perl 
being unuseable for non-trivial programs.

Sure, one of Perl's touted features is providing multiple ways to do 
the same thing, but so do many other languages, and there are such 
things as best practices.

I recommend that any programmer shop have a copy of Damian Conway's 
"Perl Best Practices" on their bookshelf.  While some items are Perl 
specific, many are validly applicable to any programming language.

Rule number one, when you write code, understand how it works and why 
it works, and make choices for how to do something on purpose; cargo 
cults are bad; understand what you are doing.

-- Darren Duncan