this post was submitted on 12 Jun 2025
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It's kinda natural to me having used Perl a lot.
That's not quite the argument you might think it is
Argument?
You know, the stuff in @_
heheh. I wasn't really making an argument though
The joke was that Perl is a clusterfuck
It certainly has its issues. I find that the things people have trouble with are the things I tend to like about it. Of course, reading it later is a problem sometimes. :)
Write only language!
I still reach for it sometimes.
The point of code is to be read by other humans, not just computers.
Sure. Nothing stopping you writing readable well commented perl. Just avoid some of the more terse statements. It can be a challenge though.
Shrug. If you don't like Perl, don't use it.
A lots of things stop you from writing readable Perl code.
You have to forget half of the syntax first. Set perlcritic to max. Force whitespaces.
Download ton of packages for every little thing and hope they are cool with each other.
And still deal with edge cases that make you pluck your eyes out.
FVO readable for future me, it's not so bad. I don't have to worry about other people so much. :)
But I want to mock it good-naturedly, too.
You clearly haven't used Perl a lot. Perl's ternary looks like:
$even = $num % 2 ? "nay" : "yay";
Incidentally, it is also the same as PHP's, but mainly because PHP stole it.
You do get the if in the middle of stuff though in the form print(debug message) if $debug
Wait until you learn that postfix conditionals are syntactic sugar and the compiler* turns that line into the equivalent of
$debug and print(debug message), putting the conditional in first place, a lot like the ternary operator.* Perl compiles to bytecode before running.
The ternary operator itself isn't implemented in terms of
and(andor) but it could be.Luckily I don't need to read or write bytecode and all that matters to me is the syntax
perl -e 'print "fart\n" if 1;'