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Comment by raffraffraff | Hacker News Reader

I've heard it called a "write-only language"

They call it like that, but it depends on the programmer as always. The problem is, that it is really flexible, more so than python or javascript, so it gives you all the tools to shoot yourself in the foot and take away the leg with it.

An example, you can rewrite the calling program in a module.(https://metacpan.org/pod/Acme::Bleach orhttps://metacpan.org/release/DCONWAY/Lingua-Romana-Perligata...)

While cool for jokes or serious DSL's, it may lead to difficult to understand code. (Nothing wrong with Damian Conway btw, I just remembered he used source filters in interesting ways).

> They call it like that, but it depends on the programmer as always.

There are different styles, but in general they are concise, and I like them.

perl use various sigils to remain concise, while other languages take a lot of room on the screen: too many letters in the usual function names, not enough sigils within the language.

It's like if everything was in binary or hex, instead of using the full range of ASCII: while technically possible, it may be harder to fit into your head

Python has one sub-style I dislike the most: using tabs for indentation, because how much EXTRA room they use on the screen.

It must not just be me, as there are solutions for coloring the spaces (I forked https://github.com/csdvrx/indent-rainbow to focus on black-and-white and using spaces instead of tabs)

I use space to limit the issue, but I can't make python less verbose.

> it gives you all the tools to shoot yourself in the foot and take away the leg with it.

python isn't innocent either: I recently traced a issue where exit(0) wasn't working to a threading problem, making a bad use of atexit.

> tabs for indentation

I don’t know a single Python project that does it. You can’t mix space and tabs for indentation.

4 spaces is the default for Python formatters like black, ruff (not sure whether it is configurable—never tried to change).

Big indent is a feature—deep nesting is a code smell.

> Python has one sub-style I dislike the most: using tabs for indentation, because how much EXTRA room they use on the screen.

Can you not adjust your tab stops?

I hate it too, because tabs look like spaces and they have a different syntactic meaning

I can, in vim it's simple. It just bothers me that it is the default and I have to take care of tabs with the rainbow, or a toggle shortcut like:

function TabCollapse_Toggle() abort

    if &tabstop ==1

        set tabstop=8

    else

        set tabstop=1

    endif

 endfunction

BTW if you hate tabs looking like other characters and other invisible characters (like spaces at the end of line, non breaking spaces...), I have a solution in CuteVim (https://github.com/csdvrx/CuteVim : just run the portable executable) where I mapped it by default to a Fxx key

If you already use vim, here's the relevant part: assuming your Shift-F11 is free, add to your vimrc:

" Default is off, `se list` to turn on and `se nolist` to turn off

" Traditional with ISO-8859-1:

"set listchars=tab:»·space:_,trail:·,eol:¶

" Or cuter with unicodes:

set listchars=tab:↹⇥,space:_,nbsp:␣,trail:•,extends:⟩,precedes:⟨,eol:↲

set showbreak=↪

inoremap <silent> <S-F11> <Esc>:set list!<CR>

noremap <silent> <S-F11> :set list!<CR>

Shift-F11 will then become a toggle, to show you tabs: you will see ↹ where the tab starts, and ⇥ for how long it is

>Can you not adjust your tab stops?

I've used this in vim for years:

:se expandtab tabstop=4 shiftwidth=4

(those can be abbreviated, check docs)

Then:

I use only tabs for indentation.

All the tabs get expanded to four spaces each.

Indenting and unindenting lines or blocks of lines, moves them by four spaces.

Never had a problem.

Maybe there are more fancy ways, but this works fine for me.

> I use only tabs for indentation.

> All the tabs get expanded to four spaces each.

Then Python will not work (?)

Sure it will work. Even before I discovered this method (which is simple), I was using four spaces typed manually, for indentation in Python, for years.

Maybe it is you who "will not work".

Did you try it before commenting? I already said it works fine.

e.g. for tabstop, use ts, and for shiftwidth, use sw.

It's more readable than C++, C or Rust though

100% depends on how it’s written. It gives a ton of flexibility regarding incorporating “magic variables” which can lead to incredibly abstruse code. The language motto is “there’s more than one way to do it”, and that’s implemented to a fault.

Paraphrased quote from one of my professors years ago:

Writing readable perl is easy, just code it like it's LISP.

Granted, he was working with it in AI/bioinformatics.

One of my classmates who moved into the IT/management side of things historically got much quicker responses from the dev team whenever he volunteered to code something, as he was always going to do it in perl.

So true.

Perl with list comprehensions do look a bit like line noise...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_programming_lang...

... but not really worse than most other languages there.

By contrast, its "higher order functions" are useful but relatively speaking, read like someone shook a box of leftover syntax all over them.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Higher-order_function#Perl

Even though C# has a seizure in the middle, Perl still seems the clunkiest.

Same with C or C++. Only recently there came up some examples of well-written C++ code. But most of old cooperate, Microsoft or Stroustrup code is just horrible, worse than hard-core perl nonsense.

Real Programmers can write FORTRAN in any language.

Making a large code base easy to read is very hard. People often work on tiny code bases and talk about how easy it is to read, not understanding that they are comparing something with a couple thousand lines of code to something with tens of millions.

> Only recently there came up some examples of well-written C++ code.

I'm not sure what you're referring to (link?) but note that whether C++ code is good or bad can depend strongly on the tooling. Certain coding patterns can be fantastic when your tooling can adequately detect their misuse, and awful when it doesn't. Which means sometimes you can't tell just look at code and tell whether it is good or bad.

> But most of old cooperate, Microsoft or Stroustrup code is just horrible, worse than hard-core perl nonsense.

I got the impression Microsoft's C code was always pretty good, their C++ not so much a decade ago - not sure how their C++ is now.

Depends on who wrote it. My own Perl code, and plenty I've seen, is extremely clean and readable; sadly, a lot isn't. I'm sure clean and readable C++ exists, but the stuff I have to work with - big codebases with tons of history - is not. "Terrifying" would be more apt in most cases.

The Perl code I write today is much cleaner and easier to follow than what I wrote 30 years ago. I hope that's true of my programs in other languages too.

> I've heard it called a "write-only language"

A frequent opinion. Easy way to fit in for people who never bothered to learn the language. Which is all the more sad that Perl is super easy to learn (one layer at a time).

Also called executable line noise, like Python is called executable pseudocode.

But I like Perl (and other languages) too.

Variety is the spice of life.

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