prollyignored

> No. I wouldn't. I'm an electrical engineer by training.

I agree. Electrical, Electronics, Civil, NASA aka Real Engineering will not have more kludges.

Phone Radiation / Drainage Systems have a few "Oh well I'll just leave it here ..."

But what about medicine, law, newspapers ? Are they not part of the real messy world ?

I agree to be a kludge worker and an idealist part time poet :) (pragmatic choice)

There you go https://github.com/runekaagaard/snowscript

PHP is a kludge. You'd be surprised to know that world is made of kludges with a few elegant hacks thrown in and not the other way round.

Performance hacks are always kludges. Can you live without them ?

Honest question, should I waste my time worrying about the "What makes syntax elegant" than working with the existing kludge ? What makes that time well spent ?

Why shouldn't I seek beauty in output and look for a programming language that get's me the output quickly ?

For all the hate given to PHP, I still can't understand why the cool-elite-rockstar-ninja-sexy-hot-hackers of python/ruby/java/go/haskell/clojure/S*t can't come up with half-as-dumb replacement for mod_php and compete with it on its own terms.

Good variable names and documentation are infinitely more important than new shitty frameworks or do vs "{" vs "\t".

> ... market that will be easily plundered due to weak political systems and fragmentation.

Profit from weapons. Profit from (medical) patents. Will never sell industrial patents, whilst exploiting African Earth.

You know the story of how chickens are fed dead-chicken-matter ?

The white man know only to take. Never to give.

You'd be surprised to know that surgical instruments make good murder weapons.

> (8 nation alliance, Opium Wars, World War II, etc). It's irrational and this is no excuse or justification of their disgusting behaviour, but I think this is what's happening in many cases.

Even today, "Caucasians" don't visit countries to make friends (Africa). The behavior is justified, from a pragmatic perspective.

Being a hippie peace freak is just silly.

> "Chinese hackers rising" that's so popular these days distracts us from the much-more formidable power that our Pentagon already has.

True that.

> Most of the work is spent on figuring out the right question to ask, and only the little part is needed to actually answer it.

These arguments are always a form of "Whole > Sum of Parts".

There is no such thing as private ideas.

It's always unwarrented-self-importance and greed that asserts otherwise.

sigh closes Sublime Text ...

Honestly, AFAIK only PHP comes with a bigger laundry list.

The only python wart I know is no block scope

    for i in [1,2,3]:
        print i
    print i # still visible 

Only functions introduce lexical scope in Python/JS. JS has the ===, this, undefined

The only ruby wart for me is the difference between block/lambda/Proc and perly features.

Java/Go/Lua don't turn you into a omlette, with their language features. Nor do they leak memory in XS like perl.

C++ is a differnt story.

EDIT: Added JS

> This decreases the syntactic pain

    use 5.018;
    no warnings "experimental::lexical_subs";
    use feature "lexical_subs";

Don't use perl experimental features. Not portable. Not well thought.

May break horribly.

"state sub creates a subroutine visible within the lexical scope in which it is declared. The subroutine is shared between calls to the outer sub."

So you should be using "state sub"

Or use python which has non-experimental "inner functions"

I use points as I am a bad writer.

* Don't use $a, $b for variable names, affecting sort

* Don't use each for iterating over hashes

* Global effects of ..

* next operator is dynamic

    sub foo() {
        next; #breaks while loop
    }

    while(defined (my $e = shift @items)) { # "0", 0 is false
       foo();
    }

* http://www.perl.com/doc/FMTEYEWTK/versus/perl.html

* Exception model based on $_ and $@

* print "$foo's fun!";

* `use constant` is broken

* my $a, $b ... declares a global $b. Not DWIM at all.

These language features are not worth the debugging time.

Regarding c) I am not a fan of use strict. If the community's priority is introducing more features like "my $_" than sane exception handling, I don't want to be a part of it and I won't recommend that language to my boss or the next FOSS project.

Did I mention XS bugs ?

I was a Perl lover once.

And now it seems I understand the haters.

Just don't use Perl.

The language seems fine, productive, even sublime at first but you will encounter some horrible design features.

Just read the following,

http://markmail.org/message/h2spyi5za4qheuft

-- Perl's data structure serialization is leaky. Thought you made an int ? Whoa ... serialized as a string.

http://blogs.perl.org/users/rurban/2013/02/no-indirect-consi...

-- A language feature causing a burnout ? Well fuck me !

That's just a tip of the iceberg.

PHP, a fractal of bad design ?

Perl, a quantum bomb, waiting to tick off.

The Modern Perl movement is like saying "I'll close my eyes and crime ceases to exist."

No best practices will save you from broken language features.

The people who maintain Perl source code, are not a _fan_ of Modern Perl. They won't make "strict" the default or introduce signatures or better OOmodel.

The people who proclaim "Modern Perl" won't fork.

Even this release shows how clueless Perl maintainers are !

* They released a switch statement long long back

* And now they mark it even as "experimental" because of the leaky "my $_" scope.

Oh God ! I will never emotionally invest in another tool.

EDIT: Neutral language.