News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

A comment on In Praise of Perl 5. Parent comment

Re:In Praise of Perl 5 by narrator on Thursday February 27, 2014 @09:46PM (#7316957)
It's really hard to write unreadable crap in Java. Even if you do, there's automated refactoring to fix it. That's the thing about Java. It makes it really hard for clever bad programmers to do a lot of damage to a project. With Perl the sky's the limit.
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:In Praise of Perl 5 by kamaal on Thursday February 27, 2014 @11:03PM (#7317182)
>>It's really hard to write unreadable crap in Java.

I work on legacy Java code bases every day, where I see thousands of lines of code all to just simply set and read variables.

I'm not sure how that's even remotely described as readable.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:In Praise of Perl 5 by rat87 on Friday February 28, 2014 @04:42AM (#7317865)
It's readable and easily followed spaghetti code it just obscures what the programs means with unnecessary details.
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:In Praise of Perl 5 by collyw on Friday February 28, 2014 @06:39AM (#7318193)
People say the same about Python, but it is completely possible. Deeply nested hashes with no comments explaining the structure. Variable names such as 'Indexes' and 'indexes' in the same function. I have had to rewrite code like that.
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:In Praise of Perl 5 by einhverfr on Thursday February 27, 2014 @10:04PM (#7317004)
As long as function and variable names are arbitrary, you can write code that appears to do one thing and does something else. Far more damage can be done that way than by straight obfuscation.
[ Parent | on HN ]