[Chicago-talk] Sharing my pain

[Brad Doty]

Ok Shawn,

I suppose it's kinda late to jump on this bandwagon, but here's my take.

Congratulations!  Even though you're part of that younger
half-generation that grew up on books written by misguided authors who
put the curly braces in the wrong place, you realize this code would be
much prettier with properly-placed braces like

foreach ()
{ 
	Just do it;
}
Alignment form follows function.

And I salute you for recognizing that fact!  

But it's short.  There's no problem following it.

Seriously, so (s)he does two things wrong.  
1. (S)he uses the shell to read a file without any error checking rather
than open.  
2. And then it's a bit loop-happy.  Could probably do all that in one
loop and centralize the filtering a bit.

But really, what's so awful about it?

If you want to use a clunky language or you don't like Perl's special
operators, don't use it.  To me, Perl's unique power is in the fact that
it eliminates a lot of boundaries on what a language can do.  Those
quirky characters are a big part of that, as it mangles text like no
other language I've worked with.  And they are the things that make this
code unique to Perl.  The issues I mentioned can be part of code in any
language.

So, is your friend saying that Perl is bad because it lets you do more
and "a lot of people" don't understand the unique Perl syntax?
Therefore it's bad?

Brad