You got me all wrong! ; -) => Re: Simple programming language anyone?

[Derek Broughton]

Andy Harrison wrote:

> On 6/14/07, Derek Broughton  wrote:
>>
>> Perl has a perldoc these days, but when I got dragged into perl
>> programming
>> last month, I couldn't even find an appliation to format it.  It's not
>> only a write-only language, it seems to have developed write-only
>> documentation!
> 
> PEBKAC.

There's no call for insults.  "perldoc" seems to be installed with perl,
but "man perldoc" doesn't exist and:
  $ perldoc --help
  You need to install the perl-doc package to use this program.

So I installed perl-doc, I still couldn't get perldoc to work (I don't know
whether it actually installed man pages), and I gave up and removed it
again.  Not worth the frustration.  Write-only documentation.  PEBDAP.

> Perldoc has been around for at least a decade, so that's a little more
> than "these days."

Sure it is.  I _quit_ using perl way over 10 years ago.

> Don't blame Perl the language for poorly written, unreadable Perl
> code. 

Why not?  Some languages encourage unreadability, and perl is one of them.
Then you have a language like python, that takes a readability enhancement
like indentation and makes it part of the language - that's a language that
_encourages_ readability.

Obviously you love perl.  You're welcome to it, but don't expect anybody to
be recommending it in a thread about simple programming languages for
students.
-- 
derek