Is Perl Better Than a Randomly Generated Programming Language? 538
First time accepted submitter QuantumMist writes "Researchers from Southern Illinois University have published a paper comparing Perl to Quorum(PDF) (their own statistically informed programming language) and Randomo (a programming language whose syntax is partially randomly generated). From the paper: 'Perl users were unable to write programs more accurately than those using a language designed by chance.' Reactions have been enthusiastic, and the authors have responded."
Better? (Score:5, Funny)
Better? How about we start with distinguishable?
Re:Better? (Score:5, Funny)
Indeed. This is the reason why the Obfuscated Perl Contest is run by the Department of Redundancy Department.
Re:Better? (Score:5, Informative)
Yet another ridiculous summary. The study wasn't which language was better, it was in which language can first-time users write a program more accurately. My guess is that Cobol would beat any of the three - it is designed from the ground up to be readable.
Quorum looks a lot like Pascal (Score:2)
My guess is that Cobol would beat any of the three - it is designed from the ground up to be readable.
So are Pascal and Python. In fact, Quorum looked a lot like Pascal from what I saw in the PDF.
Re:Quorum looks a lot like Pascal (Score:5, Insightful)
Languages that consider whitespace need to die.
Re:Quorum looks a lot like Pascal (Score:4, Insightful)
Well said.
If you want your code properly indented, just indent it. It's like the Python apologists are incapable of formatting their code properly unless the language forces its particular version of "properly" on you.
Before the trolls fire back: In the case of code written by others, run it through a pretty-printer. Problem solved. Oh, as a bonus, you can use that same tool to format code the way you prefer, and switch it back to whatever style your company requires at the press of a button. Why is this a bad thing?
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Because in practice, the automated code cleaner results in almost every line of code in the file to have a difference highlighted by my company's source code repository diff generator. This obfuscates the true nature of the change to the logic in the code I am making in order to fix a bug or implement a feature. In turn, that makes it harder for people responsible for maintaining the code to determine what exactly changed from version to version.
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I've always felt that version control systems should store syntax trees, but have never had the time to do the work to do that.
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Just enforce a formatter on commit. If the formatted code is any different from the original file, abort the commit. Git makes this kind of thing easy. It also means the repository is always in a sane state. A simple script can reformat all changed files trivially before a commit operation.
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No-one is saying that Python is good because it forces you to indent. Quite the opposite: all sane people indent their code anyway, whatever the language, so why not use that to indicate program structure?
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Because not everyone uses the same indentation as everyone else. If indentation rules need to be worked out before starting a project, you're wasting more time than a language where indentation has no meaning.
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My main objection to semantic indent can be summarized in this psuedo code example:
//end foo //end fubu
class fubu
function foo(bar)
start function
more code
all's well
console.log("debug message")
more real code
Having that debug console statement out of band with the rest of the functional indents makes it easy to notice when scanning code. Now you might say one should never debug th
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Oh the fucking irony of it. I was trying to post the following using pre and code tags without success and just ended proving your point:
Sure. Because
def function(): if condition: while ok: do_something() end while end if end def Is much more readable than: def function(): if condition: while ok: do_something()
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Most languages consider whitespace. In most programming languages where both of the following are valid, they will have different semantics:
1: foo bar
2: foobar
Quite a lot of languages even distinguish between different types of whitespace, e.g., C where the following two constructs are different, despite differing only in which particular kind of whitespace:
1: //
foo();
bar();
2: // bar();
foo();
Python may be unusual in which differences in whitespace it considers
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I had no trouble parsing that :)
But, yes you are correct.
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Really, Python's problem is that both spaces and tabs are legal - if the language required one or the other, it would be fine, modulo subjective readibility arguments about braces.
Re:Quorum looks a lot like Pascal (Score:5, Interesting)
Fortran (at least, IV and earlier) totally ignored white space, even in the middle of an identifier. Of course, this led to problems like
DO 10 I = 1.10
meaning "assign the floating point number 1.10 to variable DO10I", when the programmer meant to type
DO 10 I = 1,10
meaning "loop from here to label 10 varying I from 1 to 10".
An error something like this caused the Mariner II probe to Venus to go off course at launch and the Range Safety Officer hit the destruct.
Re:Quorum looks a lot like Pascal (Score:4, Funny)
Fortran is interesting, theologically - it considers God to be real unless declared integer.
Re:Quorum looks a lot like Pascal (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Quorum looks a lot like Pascal (Score:5, Interesting)
If those punctuation marks (or keywords) make the code more readable, then they're not gratuitous are they? I, for one, find brace-less languages fantastically hard to read, Python especially.
I LUUUUURV Python so much that if it was legal I would marry it, but I completely agree. Curly braces to denote block starts and stops make the code easier to read and manage. I should not have to wonder whether a function or block continues past the bottom of the current screen's worth of code when it ends with a few lines of whitespace because I have to know the indentation level of the next line of code to know if it's in a different block context than the last line of code on the current page. I also should never have to wonder if I re-indented code correctly when cut/pasting or adding/removing a level of block nesting.
I don't care if Python wants to keep the indentation requirements. Forcing the code of awful programmers to be more readable in this way is a good thing. Forcing all code to be less readable in another way is a bad trade-off. Just add in the damn braces! Then I can use tools to auto-indent for additional readability.
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Re:Quorum looks a lot like Pascal (Score:5, Insightful)
Personally, I find that curly braces make code easier to read on top of perfect indentation. In truth, though, it's not so much the braces, as it is the nearly-empty lines of code that are spend to put those braces (note: this specifically applies to ANSI-style brace layout only, not K&R style). It creates a kind of a visual box, clearly delimited, with body of the block in it - more so than plain indentation does by itself.
That said, I wouldn't call Python "fantastically hard to read", quite the opposite - it tends to be one of the easiest languages to read. Not because of indentation, but because its basic syntax is rather clean.
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That is only one of the two syntactic roles assigned to parentheses. The other is to disambiguate priority. For instance, you have to write (a + b) * c if you don't want it to mean add(a, mult(b, c)). But you see, combining multiple lines is very exactly this: priority disambiguation. Consider "if (cond) a; b". Priority is such that the statement is parsed like "(if (cond) a); (b)", because the if statement doesn't eat up semicolons. If you want it to mean "(if (cond) ((a); (b)))", then you could just put p
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I remember monospaced fonts. Punch cards with FORTRAN used them. Remington typewriters used them too.
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Get a language that can be programmed using with any text editor.
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Way to misunderstand what was being said on purpose. You must be a fun guy at parties.
indeed (Score:2)
me: My hovercraft (pantomimes puffing a cigarette)... is full of eels (pretends to strike a match).
them: Ahh, matches!
me: Ya! Ya! Ya! Ya! Do you waaaaant... do you waaaaaant... to come back to my place, bouncy bouncy?
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Quorum looked a lot like BASIC to me. Only the keywords were different. The headline for the article is horrible (as usual). The headline (and summary) neglect to mention that this test was given to people who had no experience in programming.
We compared novices that were programming for the first time using each of these languages, testing how accurately they could write simple programs using common program constructs (e.g., loops, conditionals, functions, variables, parameters).
My takeaway from this "research" is that Perl is not a good language for beginners. If you already know the general concepts of programming, Perl is fairly easy to pick up.
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COBOL is designed to be readable, but it's hardly writable.
(roughly 10 years of experience developing COBOL code).
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No one writes COBOL anymore.
We just tweak it.
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As I understand it, there was only one original COBOL program ever written. Everyone else copied & modified it for their purpose.
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Indeed. vim is impossible for a first-time user. That does not mean it is a terrible editor. Over-emphasizing day 1 productivity is a bad thing when most of your days will not be 'day 1'.
It's the study participants. (Score:2)
You know, the "study" (which I didn't read, this being slashdot 8-) probably involved exposing the languages in question a hugely diverse and wide ranging number of College Undergrads That Fancy Themselves Programmers. As such, the fact that the quality of the code was not distinguishable despite the language chosen indites the programmers more than the languages.
The problem with most studies is that College Freshmen already know everything so any attempt to test them is doomed to fail.
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Nonono, it's pseudorandom. They just used a very good function.
Next question (Score:2)
How does C++ fair? LOL
Re:Next question (Score:5, Funny)
How does C++ fair?
Farely average.
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I know C++ fairly well, trust me, it's the most pointlessly complex language on the planet. And the boilerplate goes on forever.
C++ might have developed sanely if they'd introduced it's major features in reverse order, i.e. lambdas way back in 1983, templates a bit later, and class methods only during the last decade. As it stands, there are basically two types of C++ code : code that badly emulates functional programming styles, and code consisting entirely of calls to simple wrappers around extern "C" f
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Unfortunately, C++ remains the only language with a full-featured yet concise RAII, which is its main advantage when compared to C. And templates, while messy, are also extremely efficient in terms of generated code - more so than similar mechanism (generics etc) in pretty much any other language I know of.
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How does C++ fair? LOL
#%@$&#@^UGSOWDYRO&F@#L(EGFGP*$TW
This Script written in Perl computes the answer.
Re:Next question (Score:4, Funny)
I dunno. Since it's a comment on Perl, starting with a # would seem to be entirely accurate according to the syntax.
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In a productivity study of experienced users, perl & python were best and C++ worst in both time to finish and lines of code.
http://www.connellybarnes.com/documents/language_productivity.pdf [connellybarnes.com]
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I've used Python, and Perl is my "goto" language (sorry, bad pun) so I tend to suspect they would do better than C/C++ in these areas too, but
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The study cited has several biases in favor of the scripted languages that are acknowledge by the author in the references of your supplied link.
Primarily:
- The non-scripted languages (C, C++, Java) were tested under formal conditions in 1997 / 1998 (Java 1.1 I assume), the script programmers wrote their programs at home and self reported their times (and in most cases spent several days thinking about the problem before starting work, time which was not included).
- The script programmers were told that the
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Far more problems fall into what you seem to consider "easy". My guess is you don't know either language nor what a hard problem really is.
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High end video games tend to involve some reasonably sticky problems...
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I did not suggest they did not. Only that they were not the only source of such problems.
Most video games seem to cheat their way out of lots of problems, something programs used for business cannot often do. A classic example of such cheating is instant hit bullets.
Java? (Score:2)
How is Java better than C++?
Trick question? (Score:4, Funny)
I always thought Perl was a randomly generated programming language.
Re:Trick question? (Score:5, Funny)
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Like everything else in Perl, the name is too long.
Pathological Rubbish would have been more apropos.
Re:Trick question? (Score:4, Informative)
Hence the name: Pathologically Eclectic Rubbish Lister.
Note for the ignorant... that REALLY IS what it stands for!
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I think APL has the edge there. It went so far as to make up its own non-ASCII symbol set.
Perl Is way better (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Perl Is way better (Score:4, Insightful)
"Its syntax is very forgiving, and there are lots of ways to do most things"
That's probably why it's so commonly known as a write-only language. "Forgiving syntax" in particular usually leads to someone sitting around later trying to figure out WTF is going on.
It's possible to write bad unreadable code in anything, but it's just so much easier in Perl that I shudder anytime I get asked to look at someone elses Perl code. That has NEVER been a good experience.
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Sounds more like an issue of EBCAK.
You can make a program that's illegible, blaming Perl for the incompetence or sloth of the people that are writing the code is hardly a fair. What about all those C programs where code is being run from random other files without concern for organization or maintainability?
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Yeah but wasn't this supposed to be measuring the efforts of "first time users".
Maintaining someone else's code is an entirely different problem.
Trying to sort out someone else's code is generally a scary experience across the board. You can make spaghetti out of any language.
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Trying to sort out someone else's code is generally a scary experience across the board. You can make spaghetti out of any language.
IME it's easier to read Java code, even decompiled java code, than just about anything. C# sharp can be easy too, but a lot more regx use, linq and such ugliness drag it down.
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use strict;
Learn it, live it, love it.
Re:Perl Is way better (Score:5, Insightful)
I would suggest that perhaps Perl is particularly effective in separating good from bad programmers. In other languages, restrictions allow bad programmers to write code that *looks* good.
But if you see readable, understandable Perl code, you know you've got a keeper.
"if you see readable, understandable Perl code" (Score:2)
One of these days that may happen to me.
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I would suggest that perhaps Perl is particularly effective in separating good from bad programmers. In other languages, restrictions allow bad programmers to write code that *looks* good.
But if you see readable, understandable Perl code, you know you've got a keeper.
I've looked at Perl like I look at English. It's possible to write really well done English that uses some obscure structures for emphasis, or to increase clarity. It is however more likely that someone will piece together the most incoherent confusing material into an English essay, and you will have difficulty following it.
Illegible code in Perl is not a fault of the language, but rather a fault of the programmer. Whether the matter of Perl letting people write so hideously is a good or bad thing, it must
Re:Perl Is way better (Score:5, Insightful)
This!
Perl is a "beautiful" language -- in the same way some people talk about certain human languages (e.g. romance languages, Russian, or Sanskrit) being beautiful, as opposed to merely functional. Other people will disparage those same languages as being too this, or not enough that... the same kind of debate we see with programming languages, particularly with Perl, which is kind of interesting.
And for some of those human languages, you'll also hear people lament how horribly some non-native speakers butcher them, perhaps because those non-native speakers are using them merely as a "functional" language, rather than grasping the full depth of expression that is possible.
This analogy has at least some merit I think, since Perl is a language that was designed "linguistically" at least in some sense, in that it has the same kinds of patterns that natural languages have and is chock full of idioms and expressions, that some programmers (myself included) find not only useful from a functional perspective, but actually enhance the creative process that happens when one writes code. I think part of that is due to Larry Wall's now venerable "Programming Perl" -- which is one of the few truly valuable programming books that's also actually fun to read -- especially if you're one of those people that thinks at least a little like Larry, and enjoys a dry wit.
Anyway, so yes, I totally agree, programmers that need "restrictions" in a scripting language to have their code be readable are definitely a certain "kind" of programmer. Not that they are better or worse programmers, they just don't embrace the TMTOWTDI philosophy, which is something that the society at-large doesn't generally embrace, so it's no surprise that there seem to be a lot of people that shit all over Perl.
I've seen (in my own code and in others) truly beautiful and elegant Perl code that reads like a story, and also the "line noise" code people complain about. Which is really all about regular expressions. Some people really love 'em, perhaps a little too much. Though as has been pointed out probably a billion times, there's nothing wrong with one-off throwaway code that looks like line noise, but if you're building a giant system, then your code should be all pretty and commented and generally sociable.
It's both unfortunate (and I still hope... a mixed-blessing) that Perl 6 has taken so long to come about. In that PHP went and pretty much took over it's niche as a web-development and "glue" language. Though the Perl community is still strong, if small, and I have no doubt that it will remain a living language for a long time to come, if for no other reason than the fact that CPAN is awesome, and there are zillions of lines of code written in Perl that a lot of people depend on every day, and that when Perl6 matures, I think it will enjoy a resurgence, within the Perl community, and perhaps much further, simply because of the simple and powerful philosophies that it encodes.
Easy things should be easy and hard things possible.
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Comments are supposed to tell you what's going on. In fact, Perl has a built-in self-documentation system that makes it a breeze to document and find the documentation you want.
You don't maintain perl code by trying to understand it and tweak it. You maintain it by replacing lines or blocks of code with better written code.
And if you're not man enough to write better code, wtf are you doing trying to maintain it in the first place?
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I certainly hope not. Whenever i see comments in C++ or Java code i'm thinking "why did you not write this to be more ovious way in the first place, wtf needs explanations here".
There a few cases where code needs comments IMO, and class-level and function-level docs are perfectly OK. But comments within source are a sign of
a) something incredibly clever being done
b) sloppy design or poorly written code that needs explanation on whats going on
In 99% of
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Despite some of the ill founded comments in this discussion, natural language is not comparable to computer language. Programming is closer to mathematics then human language. In the same
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Re:Perl Is way better (Score:4, Insightful)
"Its syntax is very forgiving, and there are lots of ways to do most things"
That's probably why it's so commonly known as a write-only language. "Forgiving syntax" in particular usually leads to someone sitting around later trying to figure out WTF is going on.
One could - quite validly - say the same about the English Language.
Now, I'll grant programming and spoken/written languages don't overlap perfectly with one another. That's why languages like LISP have such elegance; what they're designed to express is something far more abstracted and formalised in nature. It's possible to conceive of a complex structure and accompanying set of behaviours and properties simply by scanning a screenful of LISP, but English is narrative in nature. You don't scan across; you scan from top to bottom.
It's possible to write bad unreadable code in anything, but it's just so much easier in Perl that I shudder anytime I get asked to look at someone elses Perl code. That has NEVER been a good experience.
Perl can be difficult to grok, but it can be elegant as well. I've experienced revulsion looking at Perl code before, but never so consistently as with ASP and PHP. These are languages (and I use that term loosely) that simply cannot be made pretty.
In the right hands, Perl can be as elegant and expressive (and opaque, and efficient) as Shakespearean English. Argue however you like, the same is not true of many other languages. Python has clarity and simplicity. It's truly an engineer's language. LISP, as I've said, is beautiful in the same way architecture can be beautiful: taken as a whole, rather than a story. I didn't understand the appeal of Ruby until I learned that its inventor is Japanese. Then it all became clear. What seemed like awkward, nearly backward syntactical constructions suddenly made sense.
In other words, horses for courses. But arguing that Perl is not readable in its very nature is like arguing that English in incomprehensible based entirely on watching Jersey Shore.
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Again, this depends on the programmer who wrote the code, not the language.
Sure, but all the Perl documentation I've ever seen (Camel Book, etc.) encourages Perl coders to concentrate on the result foremost, even at the expense of the process. Thinking about how to write well-structured code seems to be actively discouraged in the Perl community. Once it works, you're done.
The Python community were among the first point this out: Sure, there may be "more than one way to do it," as the Perl hackers like to say, but there's probably one good way to do it. If you don't even bother to
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It depends on both. I mentioned specifically that you can write bad unreadable code in anything because it's true.
But that's like saying you can kill people with a screwdriver. It's true, but it's an awful lot easier with a shotgun. Perl just seems to make it an awful lot easier to "be clever" and come up with something that nobody can understand later. I don't consider that a good thing.
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Since it's an acronym, PERL is acceptable too.
Perl = name of language.
perl = name of compiler / interpreter
PERL = acronym for Practical Extension and Report Language
Novices learning from whom...? (Score:2)
Who taught them Perl? Where did they learn to call subroutines with an ampersand? A Perl 4 manual?
OK they're novices but even I didn't write loops using C-style loops as a novice Perl coder because I was reading that it was more readable to do for($a..$b) instead.
Re:Novices learning from whom...? (Score:5, Informative)
Yes it was Perl 4 [perl.org], which is one of the flaws in this study.
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That's sort of the the point. I'm not a good programmer, but when I code, I tend to use Perl, I focus on making the code legible and typically don't take on much with it. Perl works well with that, but there's plenty of folks that use Perl for things that it's not really intended for and don't have any idea what maintainable code should look like.
Ultimately GIGO, you need more than a study like this to determine whether or not Perl is better than a randomly generated programming language. Ultimately, I woul
Re:Novices learning from whom...? (Score:5, Informative)
"we did not train participants on what each line of syntax actually did in the computer programs. Instead, participants attempted to derive the meaning of the computer code on their own."
They were not trained. They were just shown code samples with no explanation. The code samples had 1-letter variable names and no comments. The Perl sample uses $_[0} for getting the first sub argument instead of shift, and "for ($i = $a; $i = $b; $i++)" to do a for loop instead of "foreach $i ($a .. $b)", so it is deliberately obfuscated Perl.
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A shift would have been more intuitive?
No, but perhaps a "my ($a,$b,$c) = @_;" would have been. Since I'm a long-time Perl programmer, I can't really speak for the newbie. But the use of the numerous $_[n]-lines is probably unclear. In any case, it is considered bad code, since it is both hard to read and error prone.
Using a foreach, instead of the C-style for loop, is certainly easier and MUCH closer to the implementation used in Quorum and Randomo. So that, at least, was very poorly thought-out. And Randomo? Is it really random? Or is it
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It in fact has three disadvantages: it bypasses any prototype coercions, it passes @_ unmodified by default, and it's unidiomatic.
All of these fencepost errors I've fixed argue otherwise.
Not so fast.... (Score:5, Informative)
Also... (Score:5, Insightful)
While Perl has never had a particular reputation for clarity, the fact that our data shows that there is only a 55.2 % (1 - p) chance that Perl affords more accurate performance amongst novices than Randomo, a language that even we, as the designers, nd excruciatingly difcult to understand, was very surprising.
This is a complete misunderstanding of what a p value [wikipedia.org] means in statistical inference. The p value is not, and should not be interpreted as, the chance that "Perl affords more [or less] accurate performance." The p value is the chance, given that there is no difference, of obtaining a difference as large or larger. This is covered in first-year statistics.
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...of what a p value [wikipedia.org] means in statistical inference. The p value is not, and should not be interpreted as, [perl's divergence in] accurate performance." The p value is the chance, given that there is no difference, of obtaining a difference as large or larger.
And they say English can't be obfuscated like programming languages.
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If p is the chance, given no difference, of obtaining a result that is larger, what would you interpret (1-p) to mean?
What are they trying to prove? (Score:3)
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That whitespace is a good way to delimit blocks.
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What bad habits would one learn from, say, Python?
Indentation as syntax.
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Indentation is a good habit even if it's not necessary in a language's syntax.
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Indentation is a good habit even if it's not necessary in a language's syntax.
Too much work I'm lazy. Right click auto format puts in all the appropriate indents.
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Exactly like a Python IDE.
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Sure but confusing it with syntax is a stupid idea.
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First, a question: Why is it such a bad thing to use whitespace as syntax?
Second, the act of indenting your code is not in itself a bad thing (when we talk "normal" languages like C), so why is it suddenly a bad habit when they pick it up in Python?
In a hundred years we will see this as brilliant.. (Score:2)
I keep reading the full paper (+points for publishing the whole thing!) and have yet to hit upon the definition of the word "accurate" they are using to measure the results. Apparently that is contained inside their previous paper with no direct link. On page 3 though, Perl is described as "A well-known commercial programming language". Really? C# is a commercial language, Perl
Better is a strong word (Score:2)
The participants didn't know the languages before. If anything, the study only proved that Perl has a steep learning curve.
APL (Score:2)
Didn't APL prove this a long time ago?
Well written Perl (Score:4, Interesting)
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Not each line. Only lines that need to be separated. There's no need for a semicolon if the next line is a closing curly, for example.
Some insert them anyhow, and I can see the rationale for doing so. But unfortunately, that also encourages cut/paste programming, which is especially bad for perl. I remove superfluous semicolons precisely so I will have to stop and think before doing a cut/paste job.
Southern Illinois University-Edwardsville (Score:2)
long term benefits (Score:2)
Perl and language (Score:3)
Perl is a language, just like Dutch, Swedish, English, German and most of the others. In just about any language there is, to paraphrase a well-known Perl motto, more than one way to say something. That is in many ways a good thing, especially when it comes to using the language creatively as a novelist or poet or similar type of wordsmith does.
It is true that this quality does tend to make Perl programs somewhat hard to grasp for the uninitiated in the programmers style of writing. That is another quality the Perl language shares with those other languages mentioned above - did you understand all of Finnegans Wake the first time you read it?
In other words, Perl is a writers' language. It is not an editors' language. Once you get into the right mood, Perl flows like your native language does. Done right, this can lead to great things. It can also lead to the sort of notes you made when attending those lectures you did not care about in the first place, and did not understand in the second. Use Perl for things you care about, and it will provide you the means to express yourself in just the right way (for you).
If you give someone Lisp, (Score:3)