Re: [MacPerl] The Powers of Annoy

[Brian McNett <webmaster@mycoinfo.com>]

> Hey, you took Brian's constructive criticism really well, better than I
> would have as a newbie, even though he was right in every particular. :-)
>
> The fact is, good code exemplifies a lot of things other than what most
> beginning programmers may think. Maintainability is one of them. :-)
> Brian's suggestions sort of point you down that road, and they'll stand
> you in good stead.

Arved's one of the people whose code I admire, so I take this as high 
praise indeed!

>From the standpoint of having been a writer before learning to program, I 
learned the importance of good style FIRST, long before encountering 
Perl.  Most programmers don't have that background, and have to learn 
style from scratch.  Hell!  Most language designers don't have that 
background, and end up insisting on artificial constructs like 
orthoganality, instead.

I like Perl, mostly because it's the first language I've encountered that 
I can actually program in.  It's not a "natural" language, in that it 
doesn't try to mirror the usage and structure of human speech or writing, 
 but it is a "living" language, in that it consciously borrows from other 
languages, like C, and unix tools like sed and awk.  If you were already 
comfortable with the standard Unix toolkit, adding Perl is very natural.  
For someone like me, who rarely ventures beyond the Mac, it requires 
somewhat more hand-holding, but I got lucky, as Vicki and Chris had just 
published their book when I was starting out.

--B


Brian McNett, Webmaster
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