Write Once Coders

chromatic on 2007-08-24T21:17:53

Perl is almost always used to create “write once code” and therefore ends up not being taken seriously as a modern web app development language...

— Rodney Degracia, Little Cream Soda

For any language in which a reasonably skilled practitioner can distinguish between obfuscated and de-obfuscated code, it's the fault of the programmer if code is unreadable to anyone who actually knows the language.

The readability of a program is meaningless to people who don't know the language. Likely also the problem domain.

It's time to talk about write-only coders instead of write-only languages--at least if you actually care about quality software rather than having a sneering contest.

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Typo?

gnuvince on 2007-08-24T21:37:32

s/read-only/write-only ?

Oops

chromatic on 2007-08-24T21:55:29

Yes... but I already said that English was too difficult to write correctly. Anyway, fixed now, thanks!

Ah

sigzero on 2007-08-25T00:49:11

If you can't read code that your wrote then don't blame the language blame yourself. Perl gives you a pretty powerful gun. If you take that gun and shoot yourself in the foot that is your fault.

Re:Ah

pudge on 2007-08-29T15:21:34

o/user/ Perl 5 in a nutshell, no way is the right way to do it, it's so easy to write, but, it's not always easy to read, to read ... o/user/

Although...

sigzero on 2007-08-25T00:52:21

He does make a semi-point about Ruby. Rails is being built into the next version of OSX and the Ruby bridge to Objective-C is supposed to be really good. I don't agree about Ruby in the web space arena because there simple are little to no hosting companies that have Ruby as an option and certainly not RoR.

Re:Although...

Matts on 2007-08-25T14:10:34

FWIW, the Perl bridge to Objective-C is also REALLY GOOD. In a way I'm glad it's not going to be shipped with the OS as that way I can update it outside of an official Apple update.

There's nothing I haven't been able to do with it yet (though like every open source thing, the docs are somewhat lacking).

Re:Although...

sigzero on 2007-08-26T01:16:35

I did not mean to disparage CamelBones at all. I was only commenting on Ruby. I am firmly in the Perl camp though but haven't gotten around to CamelBones yet. I am assuming CamelBones here as that is the only one that "I" know about.

Re:Although...

Matts on 2007-08-26T01:58:21

Yes, I know you didn't. But I'm trying to keep it in the forefront of people's minds as 10.5 comes out talking about scripting language bindings - CamelBones still works, and is a really amazing piece of work.