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Comment by laumars | Hacker News Reader

It was the "unmaintainable" comment that got me. This guy clearly doesn't like Perl and is letting his bias affect the list.

Perl is no less or more maintainable than any other programming language. It just depends on the developers you use that particular tool. And the whole "Perl promotes unreadable code" is really a thing of the past; modern Perl has come on leaps and bounds.

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I think if you read this in the context of Hixie being a well-know internet person, standards geek and known Perl hacker you can see that it is supposed to be humorous (and a little self-depracating being he has to maintain his own Perl scripts).

Don't take it too seriously and you will see there is a more than a grain of truth in what he says.

http://ian.hixie.ch/career/resume.html

http://lxr.mozilla.org/mozilla/find?string=PLIF/

http://software.hixie.ch/utilities/cgi/data/data.pl

http://software.hixie.ch/utilities/cgi/pingback-proxy/server...

I'm also a Perl hacker. I don't agree with it.

Everyone is entitled to their own opinion though :)

Looking at his code it becomes fairly obvious that he's not a very good Perl developer. That neatly explains why the perl row has so many mistakes.

Agreed. I thought "Paradigm: Yes" was hilarious, but the Perl row has a few errors.

"Function Overloading" should be "N/A" for a language without subroutine signatures. Any Perl function can take any combination of arguments and decide what to do with them. This is used to create de facto function overloading.

"Method Pointers: No" is ridiculous. Perl has subroutine references, which includes methods. You can even use a method name string as a method reference if you need to.

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