Perl vs Maintainibilty
- Published December 24th, 2005 in Tech Comment, Ruby, Python
While writing One controller to rule them all and praising the maintainibility of a MVC based application, I came into this site that sets some basic rules to guarantee code maintainibility.
And in the middle of the comments, I looked upon one that I find quite insightful on the question of Perl’s code tending to become cryptic and unmaintainable. Here’s the phrase he quotes:
It’s not that perl programmers are idiots, it’s that the language rewards idiotic behavior in a way that no other language or tool has ever done.
– Erik Naggum
And I couldn’t agree more. The problem isn’t Perl by itself. Anyone can do a mess with whatever language he likes. But it seems that a lot of Perl developers feel fine for doing 1337, cryptic, takes-ages-to-comprehend code. Somehow, Perl is more propitious to it. Some other languages (like Python or Ruby) seem to drive the programmer the other way around.
Once again, the programmer has the stake.
No Responses to “Perl vs Maintainibilty”