Re:Can Lisp do What Perl Does Easily?
by epi0Bauqu on Thursday September 06, 2007 @10:55PM
(#51432)
For Web stuff, I pretty much exclusively program in Perl and JavaScript when left on my own. I like both a lot. I really don't get the anti-Perl reputation as portrayed in this article, although as noted it is really old. Maybe it's just my Perl code, but I can pick up code from 10 years ago and understand it fine, and my Perl code never seems to gets out of hand as described in this rant. You always have wonder with rants what the author was actually doing...
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Re:Can Lisp do What Perl Does Easily?
by whacked_new on Thursday September 06, 2007 @11:26PM
(#51467)
I don't think any particular language causes brain damage like some more strongly-opinioned people would say. But some make it easier to write nutty code. It doesn't mean everybody writes nutty code.
Just like how being surrounded by junk food predisposes you to poor dietary habits and possibly in consequence, heart problems, it's not impossible to eat healthy and stay fit.
Shunning the environment/language/tool is understandable, but equating it to the root of the problem always involves some exaggeration. The NASA code released not long ago had GOTOs in it and I don't think it costed lives.
The author of that rant is a purist. He believes that if everyone would slow down, learn Lisp values and implement them in their code, so that eventually they, and perhaps more importantly the next generation will be far better able to focus on essential difficulties rather than incidental ones.
His argument is that perl programmers are all busy solving immediate problems that would have never been problems to begin with if everyone had been using Lisp the way it was meant to be used. And they're often not solving problems in Lisp-fashion.