How Perl Saved the Human Genome Project (1996)

Re:How Perl Saved the Human Genome Project (1996) by Moto7451 on Sunday May 05, 2013 @03:20AM (#5657707)

I've had to deal with my fair share of C# which was written in a "write once" manner. My favorite being when a particular dev wrote an entire Silverlight application while ignoring how the framework functioned. The best bit of obfuscation were sections of code littered with constructs like "((DesiredType)parent.parent.parent.parent.parent).method" where each parent was an Object reference.

Any language can be used to write a riddle. Even Python[1][2]. It's the community's values that determine code quality. The banner of "impossible to read" hangs over the Perl community and it has been my experience that it reminds us to write much better code.

[1] http://www.python.org/search/hypermail/python-1993/0232.html [2] http://p-nand-q.com/python/obfuscated_python.html

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Re:How Perl Saved the Human Genome Project (1996) by micro_cam on Monday May 06, 2013 @01:01AM (#5660950)

Good perl programers write very readable code. The problem is that academic code bases often have a lot of involvement from novice new programers.

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Re:How Perl Saved the Human Genome Project (1996) by Mithaldu on Sunday May 05, 2013 @03:28AM (#5657720)

> The banner of "impossible to read" hangs over the Perl community

It hangs there, put there by other people. Sadly it correctly would hang above people writing perl but outside the community. We have many efforts going on to get people to write nice and readable Perl.

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