Thanks from biologist choosing new programming language

[James S. Rogers]

"Gordon D. Pusch" <gdpusch at NO.xnet.SPAM.com> wrote in message
news:giwukaim7o.fsf at pusch.xnet.com...
> ladasky at my-deja.com (John Ladasky) writes:
>
> > Perl looks useful.  But its readability appears to be subject to the
> > whims of the programmer, just like in C.
>
> It is possible to write unreadable code in =ANY= language. Readability is
a
> function of the programmer's discipline to force themself to write
readable
> code, not the language the code is written in.

I agree, but some languages make it much easier to write
unreadable code than do other languages.  See the following
example of a "Hello World" program in Befunge:

                 v
>v"Hello world!"0<
,:
^_25*,@

>
>
> > Shortcuts abound.  You can write a single line of code that does
> > everything but the laundry.  Good luck trying to figure out what
> > it means when you go back to read it a month later!
>
> "Can" does not imply _MUST_. The perl mantra is, ``There's More Than One
> Way To Do It'' (TMTOWTDI, pronounce ``Tum-tow-tiddi''). Just because you
> _can_ write multifunctional code that looks like line noise doesn't mean
> you =HAVE= to write it that way. Well-structure perl code that does not
> exploit tricky obscure side-effects to save keystrokes can be every bit
> as readable as PASCAL.
>

And, unfortunately, writing Perl like Pascal is considered bad form
by many Perl programmers.

Jim Rogers