And I don't think the blob should have sympathy.

I'm working with matlab currently. It is simultaneously the best engineering tool ever and the worstest, lousiest development environment ever. It has tremendous shortcuts for doing things quickly and powerfully but everything has been added in haphazard, half-cocked, half-assed fashion.

I can see how the two face of matlab have evolved together in the way that Perl has amazing power and horrible maintainability. I don't see that they would have to have evolved together. Ruby, for example, does what Perl does but with more sanity.

Matlab is a horrible language, although at least it has lambdas now. Have you looked at SciPy? It can't replace some of the more specialized toolboxes of course.

http://www.scipy.org/

Matlab is a requirement for what I'm currently doing.

I'll research lambdas.

But I meant it also in saying that Matlab is the greatest engineering tool ever. You can do amazing things in 200 lines. Then you do 400 lines and get caught in some BS for days. But if you remember to do only 200 lines (even just 2 lines), then you can be a very, very good and feel very productive.

That was the harshest criticism of Conway's "Perl Best Practices" I've seen.

Details and exact choices of libraries can be discussed, but... could you be more specific?

Or were you talking of 1990s code, before e.g. testing took over the Perl world? Nah, straw men like that on HN... not possible.

In my experience, Perl has inherent problems with readability on a line-by-line basis. I don't think that there's anything that can be added to change this - testing would prove a line does certain things but given that a test isn't complete specification, testing couldn't by itself change the readability problem.

Again, Perl would have more justification if Ruby wasn't visible

If someone references a book with author/title, PLEASE at least check a review on the web before commenting.

I was hoping that any answer might be insightful.

(Readability is mostly a function of familiarity. Everything has advantages/disadvantages, if I'd list the problems with Perl, readability wouldn't be there.)

Here is a new comment (with links etc) on "Perl best practices"

http://www.dagolden.com/index.php/199/time-for-second-editio...