On Friday 06 June 2008 12:02:19 Jenda Krynicky wrote:
> David Masover wrote:
> > On Wednesday 04 June 2008 12:20:37 Star Cross wrote:
> > 
> >> Lesson: You can make Ruby every bit as messy as Perl if you want to.
> > 
> > Very true. But can you make Perl as pretty as Ruby?
> 
> BS. Not unexpected. Besides beauty is in the eye of the beerholder, 
> cleanliness likewise.

People who don't know me often make the mistake of assuming I ask rhetorical 
questions.

I really don't think Perl can be made as pretty as Ruby, but then, Perl has 
Acme::Lingua::Pirate::Perl, so anything's possible.

> > Every language can be made messy. Not every language can be made clean.
> 
> Agreed. For example with the meaningful newlines there are cases when 
> you can't make the Ruby code clean, because you either can't break the 
> overly long line or you can, but you end up with an operator lost on the 
> far right or with some silly line continuation character.

However, with required semicolons, you have every line looking ugly, except 
just the edge cases. And that's just line endings -- never mind the 
dereference operator and $calar prefix that become pretty much pure annoyance 
for OOP.

Also, it's hardly unprecedented -- shells have had meaningful newlines with \ 
escaping forever.

> Robert Klemme (Guest) on 04.06.2008 23:00 wrote:
> > I have the impression that when writing Perl programs people usually 
> > use nested structures of arrays, hashes and scalars to represent
> > complex data whereas in Ruby land people - at least I - tend to rather
> > create classes and use them because it is so much easier than in Perl.
> 
> Or could it be that using the nested structures is harder in Ruby? 

Is it? Looks pretty easy to me.

> Oftentimes the classes are simple to make but do they give you anything? 

Yes, it's called Object-Oriented Programming. Perhaps not in every case, but I 
would argue that because of how much more tedious Perl makes classes -- and 
nice patterns like setters/getters -- there are going to be cases where a 
separate class would really be appropriate, but Perl people will tend towards 
data structures instead.

> Dave Bass (dogsbody) on 05.06.2008 17:01 wrote:
> > I find the contrary. Uncommented Perl is typically impossible to 
> > understand unless you wrote it yourself. It *is* possible to write 
> > clear Perl but, as with C, most people don't bother.
> 
> Uncommented hungarian is impossible to understand as well ... unless you 
> actually know that language. Or maybe you were talking about golf or 
> yaph or poetry?

I don't think this is a comment on the actual languages, but their respective 
communities. If people are drawn to Ruby because of pretty syntax, they're 
probably likely to hold clean, readable syntax as a desirable goal.

But that could also be a reflection of Perl having been around for so much 
longer that it has a more diverse community.

I won't say more about that, though. I care more about being able to code 
cleanly from scratch than how much clean code already exists to play with -- 
otherwise, I'd probably be using Perl, for CPAN alone.