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000058_icon-group-sender _Sat Oct 21 15:17:38 1995.msg
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Received: by cheltenham.cs.arizona.edu; Sat, 21 Oct 1995 16:39:34 MST
Message-Id: <199510212011.AA11175@optima.cs.arizona.edu>
Date: Sat, 21 Oct 1995 15:17:38 -0500
From: John David Stone <stone@math.grin.edu>
To: icon-group@cs.arizona.edu
Cc: cdt@post.its.mcw.edu, stone@post.math.grin.edu
Subject: Perl vs Icon
In-Reply-To: <Pine.ULT.3.90.951021064359.29085A-100000@post.its.mcw.edu>
References: <Pine.ULT.3.90.951021064359.29085A-100000@post.its.mcw.edu>
Errors-To: icon-group-errors@cs.arizona.edu
Chris D. Tenaglia writes:
> No sweat, it probably can be mastered in a weekend with a good
> manual ...
Hoo hoo, have you got a surprise in store for you, Chris. Except
perhaps for JCL and C++, Perl is the worst-designed language ever to win
the hearts of hackers. It's full of tiny little inconsistencies and
misfeatures that will reach out and bite you in unexpected ways. Check
with those sysadmins who claim to know and use it and find out how many
weekends they spend trying to debug their Perl scripts by trial and error.
Ask them for a Perl script that they've worked on and do a walkthrough with
them; I predict that you'll find a bug every ten lines or so.
In short, the case for Icon over Perl is that well-written Icon
programs are relatively robust, intelligible, and maintainable. There are
almost no well-written Perl programs, but even if your colleagues manage to
provide one, you'll almost certainly be able to show them how to do the job
better in Icon. You're more likely to win if you can get them to agree to
a direct comparison of particular programs that do the same job.
------ John David Stone - Lecturer in Computer Science and Philosophy -----
-------------- Manager of the Mathematics Local-Area Network --------------
-------------- Grinnell College - Grinnell, Iowa 50112 - USA --------------
---------- stone@math.grin.edu - http://www.math.grin.edu/~stone/ ---------