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Comment by jrockway | Hacker News Reader

Python being readable is FUD. I've seen tons of horrible Python. Of course, I've also seen tons of horrible Perl (and PHP, and even Lisp).

Basically, in the hands of incompetent programmers, everything is unreadable. If you are disciplined, you can write easily-readable Perl. I (and my coworkers) do it every day.

Oh, one other thing... the linked article is from 2000. In the last 8 years, the Perl community has figured out how to program... so most of his points aren't relevant anymore. Nobody writes 2000-style Perl anymore.

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one can write readable anything, but some languages encourage it more, both in the language features and syntax, and also in the community, tutorials, etc

Yes, Perl encourages readability in the language by one of its language features, the helpful prefixes in front of variable names.

This is a joke, right? You can't possibly be serious.

No, I was serious.

When I look at a variable in Python, say, p, to take an example from the code shown in the Python documentation, there is no way to tell what p is. Is it an array? A dictionary? A tuple? Something else? With Perl I get more information just by looking at the variable. That makes it more readable.

Python, on the other hand, is still very nice. Maybe one of these days it will get me, especially if the libraries grow to match the breadth of CPAN.

Incidentally, I often see people complaining about non-idomatic python tutorials here.

What I see from this is that people will try to TMTOWTDI regardless of whether or not that's the language's philosophy. At least Perl prepares you to expect people writing code that doesn't look like yours.

(And I'm used to people's weird styles. I have one friend who makes every line of code its own subroutine, and another that gives every method a super_descriptive_but_way_way_too_long_name. You get used to it, and emulate it when appropriate. It's better to decide on a style with your friends/coworkers instead of being told what to do by some guy that works at Google you've never met.)

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