[Discuss] Interpreters vs Compilers

[Adam Parkin]

Deryk Barker wrote:
>> I for one have written Perl programs tens of thousands of lines long 
>> and they are still easy to understand and maintain even after I 
>> haven't looked at them for years; easy for both myself and for other 
>> people.
> Darren, a good programmer can write maintainable code in virtually any 
> language, but some languages make this easier and some more difficult. I 
> maintain that perl falls in to the latter group. As does assembler - and 
> I have written tens of thousands of lines of *that*, well structured and 
> well commented but not *easily* maintainable.

I agree with you both: a good programmer can write good code in any 
language with which he/she is familiar.  As well, I agree that some 
languages have concepts/constructs/idioms that lend themselves to good 
programming practices (one could argue that the use of whitespace for 
structing code ala Python is an example of this), and some have 
concepts/constructs/idioms which lend themselves to poor practices (some 
have argued that things like operator overloading or multiple 
inheritance in C++ are examples of this).

I also agree that Perl is a language where it is very possible to write 
good code.  In fact, I'd argue that if you find Perl code 
unreadable/unmaintainable it's probably more due to unfamiliarity with 
the language than something inherent in Perl itself.

Personally I find Python programs I've come across not particularly 
readable due to the fact that I'm not hugely familiar with that language 
(for example, the first time I saw __init__ in a Python program it took 
me a bit before I realized that that was the constructor for a class, as 
it's different from the convention in many other languages that a 
constructor shares the same name as the class itself).

> In fact no program of that size is easily maintainable, whatever the 
> language.

Very true.
-- 
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Adam Parkin
E-mail: pzelnip at gmail.com
Blog: http://pzelnip.blogspot.com/
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