Good Starter Language? (was Re: REALBasic and OpenAL)

[Frank Wiles]

On Thu, 31 Mar 2005 15:09:46 -0600
"Jeremy Fowler" <JFowler at westrope.com> wrote:

> Perl? Might as well be writing code in Mandarin Chinese. The multitude
> of symbols and one character keywords sacrifices legibility for less
> typing. Perl is not for the faint of heart or the beginner. I for one
> hate having to keep a whole library of O'Reilly books by my side while
> I code. A good language should be intuitive and not require a ton of
> syntax memorization. Python is better, but not by much. 

  You do know that you can write easily readable Perl don't you? Just
  because those weird variables like $_, $', $*, $/, etc exist doesn't
  mean you have to use them.  In fact they already have built in
  "english" equivalents. 

  I've always seen Perl's ability to do this much like Unix. It gives
  you enough rope to hang yourself with, it's your choice whether or
  not to use that rope. ;) 

  Anyone who uses the shortcuts does so knowing they are sacrificing
  readability and maintainability.  This, as I've said one more
  occasions than most people probably want to hear, is the fault
  of the programmer not the language. 

  While you can write: 

  open(IN, $ARGV[0]); 

  while(<IN>) { chomp; $_ =~ s/A/B/oig; print; print "\n"; } close;

  You can also write: 

  my $filename = $ARGV[0]; 

  open(IN, $filename) or die "Cannot open input file '$filename': $!\n";

  while( my $line = <IN> ) { 
        chomp($line); 
        $line =~ s/A/B/oig;  # Replace all As with Bs
        
        print "$line\n"; 
  }

  close(IN); 
  
 ---------------------------------
   Frank Wiles <frank at wiles.org>
   http://www.wiles.org
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