On Aug 24, 2010, at 09:43 , Chad Perrin wrote:

> On Tue, Aug 24, 2010 at 03:38:42PM +0900, Ryan Davis wrote:
>> 
>> On Aug 23, 2010, at 08:10 , Chad Perrin wrote:
>> 
>>> On Mon, Aug 23, 2010 at 04:20:54PM +0900, Ryan Davis wrote:
>>>> On Aug 22, 2010, at 20:12 , Chad Perrin wrote:
>>>>> 
>>>>> On Mon, Aug 23, 2010 at 08:38:40AM +0900, Caleb Clausen wrote:
>>>>>> 
>>>>>> Ruby is designed to be easy for humans to read, which means it is not
>>>>>> easy for computers to parse. As opposed to say, perl, which is hard
>>>>>> for both humans and computers to parse. If you were to write down in
>>>>>> one email a complete set of rules, it would be a pretty long email.
>>>>> 
>>>>> I find Perl pretty easy to parse.  Maybe yours is a personal problem.
>>>> 
>>>> No, you do not find perl pretty easy to parse. [...] 
>>> 
>>> Regardless of nitpicky phrasing, I found your comment about Perl kind of
>>> ass-ish.  It seems kind of ironic to be called an ass for pointing out
>>> that your problems with Perl may not be others' problems, when you make a
>>> categorical deprecating statement about Perl.
>> 
>> There is nothing nitpicky about it. YOU _can't_ parse perl, yet you
>> claim you can and that it is pretty easy. [...]
>> 
> You apparently think I'm saying my brain has an implementation of the
> perl runtime installed on it.  By that standard, none of us can parse
> Perl, or Ruby, or Python, or C, or Scheme, or any other nontrivial
> computer programming language.
> 
> I'm just saying that I can look at some Perl code and figure out what
> it's doing -- a necessary task if you're going to try to maintain some
> Perl code.

And I'm "just saying" that you were being an ass to Caleb when you suggested his comment about perl to be a personal problem. His comment is a fact. Perl is difficult for both man and machine to parse. I'm also "just saying" that you're wrong when you said that you found perl pretty easy to parse. You don't. You can't. That's been pointed out several times and you dance around it. You look at perl and "figure out what it's doing", meaning: you EVALUATE it in your head in order to determine what the code is doing. If you don't, then you're not as good as you think you are and perl is a lot more difficult than you realize. (or as a possible alternative, you're only dealing with kindergarten-level perl--which is a good thing really.)

By the standard you think I'm setting, MANY of us can mentally statically parse ruby, python, most C, and especially scheme, just like MANY of us learned how to diagram natural languages like English in grade school.

In increasing order of difficulty to parse: scheme, python, C, ruby.

Notice that perl isn't on that list.