were doing. Part of that is readability, part is the lack of OOP, but it
does make a point of where Ruby shines over Perl. However, I myself have
quickly written Ruby spaghetti code, so it’s not just a language thing by
itself.
I’ve worked with Perl as my main language for the last 10 years and am
currently learning Ruby. Although I love the design of the language I find
the lack of code structures - @, $, %, {, ->, \ - difficult to adjust to.
It takes a while to get used to, in comparison Ruby and Python feel
naked,
you have nothing to anchor your brain.
In my view this happens because Perl is kinda statically typed, the
sigils
indicate data types. Ruby and Python lack this kind of metadata.
It will probably become my main language eventually but at present Ruby
code, like Javascript, looks like sentences full of barewords. That has me
thinking - is “bareword” a Perlism?
I think Y2K was the height of COLBOL’s comeback. There were an awful lot
of companies looking for COLBOL programmers to help them fix their older
code.
Perhaps when Y3K approaches, COBOL programmers will be called upon again
to fix the fixes that were hardcoded to work for 2xxx only.
On Thu, Sep 26, 2013 at 5:14 AM, mark edwards [email protected]
wrote:
if i am using semicolons and nobody else is, that’s like showing up at
the toga party and i am the only one wearing a toga.
Exactly. I personally actually prefer the low syntactic overhead of
Ruby over Perl. I find it much harder to read Perl code particularly
because of all the semicolons and special character that are loaded
with meaning.
ok i guess i can get used to not using the semicolons ! its just when
i first learned c, i was totally enamored with them.
former cobol’ers will no doubt remember using the period, but the rules
for when you used a period (and when you don’t use it) were so bizarre
it just made the code unreadable. or if you did try to read it you got
a readers cramp because cobol was so long and wordy.