For things you deal with all the time, this is actually somewhat of a
benefit, because the different operations *look* different. Natural
languages work this way too--the most ragged-looking parts of a
language are usually the parts most used, such as pronouns, or forms of
"to be". It's harder to learn, but then there are more visual
distinctions to make use of later.
: Evidently, perl 5 addresses the nesting problem, but still seems
: overly complex to me.
There's the kind of complexity that maps naturally onto complex
problems, and the kind of complexity that doesn't. Many of the changes
in Perl 5 were actually to remove the second kind of complexity.
Many language designers make the mistake of trying to avoid the first
kind of complexity, and end up forcing the users to write more complex
programs to make up for it. This is no fun.
: Even supposing the complexity to be a misperception on my part, the
: reknowned difficulty in reading and adjusting established perl code,
: even your own code, betrays my integratibility criterion...
Well now. I happen to see every reference to Perl that goes by on
Usenet, and apart from the occasion slam-dunk quote from non-users
about rot13 or uuencode, this "renowned difficulty" is simply not so
renowned as all that. I don't think I've seen anyone complain that
they couldn't come back and read their own code, unless they were being
intentionally obfuscational to begin with (Hi Randal). And I've never
heard anyone *not* complain about working on someone else's code. :-)
Frankly, I think it's easy to write beautiful code in Perl 5. But I
may be slightly prejudiced in the matter...
Larry Wall
lwall@netlabs.com