Phoenix.pm: quoting constant hash keys survey

[Victor Odhner]

Anthony Nemmer wrote:
> Rename Perl 6 to something else.

I'm definitely wit'cha on that one, Tony.

I've been coding in Perl for 10 years now.  I came from
a long background in ALGOL, COBOL, PL/I and C with
forays into a few other languages -- Prolog, Lisp,
APL in all its terse Greek glory, VB, Honeywell's
proprietary "tex", Euler, ADA and yes, even JOVIAL.

I never did anything in all those other languages that
couldn't have been done more effectively in my little
corner of Perl 5.8, except for the tiny set of problems
that needed to be coded to the bare metal in ALGOL or C.
And Perl might have even done better in those cases.

Note that some people think like mathematicians and can
say an enormous amount in a few symbols.  They can fly
spaceships to Neptune without error, but heaven help
anyone who tries to read the stuff.

Others are verbal types and, like me, think in prose.
Besides that, I'm a little slow.  So I like code that says
exactly what it's doing, and doesn't take too much detective
work to figure out what I'm looking at.

I don't need to "use english" because I happen to know Perl
and can tell $! from $|.  I shun syntactic sugar in general
because it just weighs down the language.  I save intermediate
variables so that my comments can explain what they are and
why I needed them.  I use lots of whitespace.  I break
statements into multiple lines if necessary, with continuations
nicely indented, so I have no problem with
$this_hash{'that_subscript'} or with $object->function().

I find that a *small* subset of Perl just does too much too well
for me to stray into academic vortices, innovatio ad naseam.
The proposed book cover says it all for me:
  <http://onestepback.org/articles/usingruby/images/p6_cover.gif>

I don't mind hashes of function references or fairly
complex regexp code, but in general I take it one step
at a time and don't need "more than one way to do it".
I'll even dare to say that your way is *wrong* if you drag in
Yet Another Library so you can code your program in some
"language" other than Perl.

Specifically, the << >> and backtick things are YOOgly, and I
won't go there unless *ordered* to on pain of termination.

I've worked in APL.  Terse is *not good*.  (Although having
matrix inversion built into the language definitely rocks.)

Sign me "stuck in the mud".  If the mud is Perl 5.8, it's not
half bad.

Vic

P.S. -- Oh, and I'll look at Ruby when I start seeing it
in employment ads.  ;-)