Perl is no more accurate than randomly-generated language

An analogy: I don’t know how to read sheet music with any proficiency. It would be easier for me if note duration were shown by horizontal length instead of the system of tails and open/filled circles. However, this wouldn’t be as good for experts, who care more about fingering than about being able to see the melody in the most literal way.

I don’t happen to like perl’s syntax, but this study by itself isn’t proof that it’s objectively bad for the people who use it heavily.

I first met Perl after spending some years working in the UNIX command line environment, and it made intuitive sense ... to someone who primarily used awk, sed, and bash (and able to get stuff done in C). I was up to speed and productive in it within a couple of days. (This was in the days of Perl 4 -- the OO stuff in Perl 5 came years later.) At that level, Perl was basically every UNIX text-handling tool rolled into one handy bundle oriented around script execution rather than interactive shell work, with a bunch of POSIX extras and things like the socket() API thrown in to take it beyond the toy language level.

The point is, Perl isn't a beginner's language. Rather, it's an elaboration of a pre-existing toolset that assumes you're already familiar with the UNIX way before you get started. Pitching it against a teaching language isn't even an apples/oranges comparison: it's like comparing a circus merry-go-round to a helicopter (they're simply not intended for the same purpose or the same user demographic).

While this is interesting, presenting it as a “randomly-generated language” is extremely misleading.

"participants were given a code sample worksheet for the particular language group they were in. The general idea of the experiment is to give novice users code samples similarly to if a participant was learning to program from home on the Internet.

This code shows one of the code samples provided to participants."

    $x = &z(1, 100, 3);

    sub z{
        $a = $ [0];
        $b = $ [1];
        $c = $ [2];
        $d = 0.0;
        $e = 0.0;
        for ($i = $a; $i <= $b; $i++){
            if ($i % $c == 0) {
                $d = $d + 1;
            }
            else {
                $e = $e + 1;
            }
        }
        if ($d > $e) {
            $d;
        }
        else {
            $e;
        }
    }

If all their perl samples looked like that it should not be a surprise to anyone that their test subjects were entirely confounded. What is missing in that paper is a description of how they actually sourced their code samples, as well as a list of all code samples provided.

s/no more accurate/no easier for beginnners to learn/

What a silly thing to test in isolation; does the syntax of a programming language present a greater barrier to a novice than the semantics of programming?

A better study would have controlled for the ability of the eighteen participants to describe their algorithms in pseudocode.

  $x = &z(1, 100, 3);
  
  sub z{
    $a = $_[0];
    $b = $_[1];
    $c = $_[2];
    $d = 0.0;
    $e = 0.0;
  
    for ($i = $a; $i <= $b; $i++){
      if($i % $c == 0) {
        $d = $d + 1;
      }
      else {
        $e = $e + 1;
      }
    }

    if($d > $e) {
      $d;
    }
    else {
      $e;
    }
  }

  $x = z(1, 100, 3);
  
  sub z{
    my( $a, $b, $c ) = @_;
    my $d = 0;
    my $e = 0;
  
    for ($a..$b){
      if($_ % $c == 0) {
        $d++;
      }
      else {
        $e++;
      }
    }
  
    if($d > $e) {
      return $d;
    }
    else {
      return $e;
    }
  }

If you don't explain the logic behind the special characters, of course it's easier to learn what the code is about from the notation which has less special characters and less semantic behind the special characters, like their better faring language:

  action z(integer a, integer b,
  integer c) returns number
  number d = 0.0
  number e = 0.0
  integer i = a
  repeat b - a times
  if i mod c = 0 then

[1] http://blog.plover.com//prs/accidental-syntax.html

Thousands of people learned programming using perl. This is much more significant than this ridiculous study (randomo language? quorum? give me a break would you?).

Fortunately, at least this poor-piss stuff won't make the headlines, like too many such ridiculous studies run on 30 students do (remember lately "women wearing make-up appear more competent", augh).