Comment Reading each other's code? (Score 2) 263
Lots of comments about being unable to read code authored by someone else (as usual), but who are these "professional perl coders"? I'd say I'm an intermediate perl programmer, and I've had no trouble reading my old code or anyone else's provided it's been written sensibly. Hell I've even been able to decipher some pretty Byzantine code when required.
Perl isn't a language without faults, for example OO is not fun in perl. However, it mystifies me to see perl criticised for readability when the coder is, in no small part, responsible for making something decipherable. I've seen shocking code in several languages, where I work I know there's a particularly hairy example of cold fusion we're still struggling to tame... Diabolical use of in-line HTML, thousands of lines of code without so much as an attempt at basic formatting (no indents) etc, etc. It was written by a genius I'm told, but why they deserve that title when they weren't smart enough to write something we could maintain I'll never know.