Ted Ashton writes:

>Thus it was written in the epistle of James Ots,
>...
>>
>>       I also keep hearing about it being readable, but I've never seen a
>> single readable piece of Perl code yet.
>
>Isn't this just a little like saying, "I've never learned to read Russian and
>I've never seen a single readable piece of Russian yet"?

Oh, goodie... a softball. Language wars are much less stressful than the
present hot topic.

No, it's not the same thing. Programmers ought to be able to read
programs even without much training in a specific language. Languages
that meet that test -- ALGOL, FORTRAN, COBOL, BASIC -- tend to have long
lives. Languages that violate that principle -- LISP, APL, SNOBOL,
Smalltalk -- tend to be used only by tiny communities or fall by the
wayside. I've written programs in all of the latter languages, and
they're far more powerful than general-purpose languages like C or COBOL
for certain tasks. They're also capable of handling ordinary business
data processing. But their quirky syntax leaves uninitiated programmers
in the dust.

I've now run across two companies who've had to throw away large
investments in Perl code because it was utterly unmaintainable by anyone
except the suddenly-departed original author. There are serious
disadvantages from a longevity point of view to any language with a
syntax that can't be understood without special training. I want to be
able to have someone pick up any program that's important to my business
and have some idea of what it does, whether or not they've had special
training. Perl doesn't meet that test. I wish that LISP did, and
especially Objective C. But I'll forego their power in order to make sure
that someone can pick up the program in 15 years and figure out more or
less what it's doing.

-- Bruce


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