After losing my previous job in January I was prepared for a lengthy period of unemployment as I pondered my various options. The one I was (and still am) most interested in pursing would involve a pretty radical career change so I could do something that makes use of my longstanding interest in native plants and environmental sustainability.
While doing that, I also sent some résumés off for high-tech jobs, mainly because doing so was a requirement for getting unemployment insurance. One of them was for a position in downtown Portland I thought I was something of a stretch for. Surprisingly, they called me asking if I could interview (the first interview I had been called for since being laid off), and even more surprisingly they then offered me the position (as well as paid relocation).
I’m sort of dreading the fact that it involves Perl programming. I just purchased the most recent issue of Programming Perl, and it never fails to astound me at how abominably designed that language is. Nothing is clean, nothing is simple, nothing is straightforward. It’s all a mass of hundreds of syntax rules, each with little relationship to any overall picture. Then we have all the exceptions to the rules, and exceptions to the exceptions. And it’s done in the name of making it “easy,” “intuitive,” and “natural.”
The latter may sound seductive, but remember: Navajo, Chinese, and Basque are all natural languages, while Esperanto is artificial.
Instead of having to form a conception of a clean, abstract syntactical system of some sort, with Perl one is forced into a computer-language equivalent of learning to speak Chinese: playing mind reader and attempting to guess what Larry Wall’s own personal subjective idea of “intuitive” was when he designed this or that linguistic feature.
The one good piece of news about Perl is that its designers are apparently starting to choke on their own medicine. They’re having a devil of a time coming up with the next major release of the language. Perl 6 has been a work in progress for a number of years now, and people are starting to wonder if it will end up being vaporware. Seeing what a complex mess Perl 5 is, all of this is hardly a surprise.
And it couldn’t happen to a nicer language.
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