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~ another look at perl in a positive note |
I have always been a critic of perl since it seems to be able to produce the most bizarre, seeming unreadable source expressions that are not words one can remember, compared to a procedural language that is basically a bunch of pronounceable words called after each other, and a few symbols scattered in.
However, one time I was looking at perl, and realized, you can write simple C like or Pascal like code in Perl, if you just code that way. Perl has most or all of the features of C, so if you use a disciplined subset of Perl you can write simple "call this procedure after this procedure" C like (or Pascal like) code, with a huge bonus added: Perl has no requirement for you to dangle yourself in C's pointers everywhere (or Pascal's), and Perl has Strings (absolute necessity), which C does not (pointers to chars do not count as strings, in my book).
There is even some Perl code written in this very manner, that I have seen, occasionally. AFAIR some of the BSD Perl sources out there is written in this way (by some competent programmers), without over abusing too many of Perl's symbolic regex soup syntax. I once wrote an article about how Larry Wall's criticism of Lisp, "finger nail clippings mixed in oatmeal", could be equally applied to Perl in a different meal at the table: alphabet soup with regex symbols instead of letters as the noodles.
One advantage of Perl over all these other languages, is in Perl you can write an actual simple procedure, and call it, without having to first nest that procedure into a mess of an object or class, like in Java, C#, or Ruby. I.e. Perl does not obnoxiously force Object Orientation or Class oriented messes upon you. One of the best feelings a programmer can have is to fire open his editor, and just start writing a regular old procedure, without first having to put boiler plate classes, objects, nests, or other junk in the way. Oberon, GoLang, Pascal, and C, all allow this dream to be fulfilled, but so does Perl, and so did it for all this time.
Similar positive notes could be said about PHP, since it has some similarities. However I'd like to research Perl more and not so much focus on PHP in this article, simply because I've been away from Perl for basically ever, and have avoided it always. With worry of course, of being at the candy store.
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