By this list, my current job has me doing Voodoo and Satanism… :eek:
Anyone want to add some languages to this list? I’d especially like it if someone came up for something for IDL that I could use to tease Mr. Neville about.
Perl is incomprehensible? When I took Programming for Linguistics, we trained in Perl precisely because it was easy to understand and worked well with regex.
Once upon a time they invented an incredibly powerful computer, many orders of magnitude better than anything that had gone before. They turned it on, and asked it whether it would be possible for it to tell them the meaning of existence.
It got kinda warm for the longest time, and then came back with its reply. “Yes, I can explain the meaning of existence, though it will be very difficult. In fact it will be quite an effort. And I will have to invent Mathematica first.”
I agree on your definition better than the link’s, Ataraxy. I’m a Satanist and I know how to use BASIC, and I can’t see any conceivable connection between the two.
Perl isn’t incomprehensible, it’s just really hard to know thoroughly.
Perl really is a radical design by Larry Wall - who not incidentally is a linguist - as a compromise between traditional “C-like” programming languages and natural language. The end result (and I say this as someone who’s used perl for years, knows prettly much all of the ins and outs - and actually likes it) is a language that initially gives you a false sense of knowing what’s going on and then forces you to accept all kinds rigid but really quite hidden rules in order to build anything solid. It’s fine if you’re in a multi-year program to get to know the language, but it will probably suck if you’re using it to build a big system from scratch unless you’ve already messed with it for a couple of years.
as for the “write only language” comment - perl gives you quite a lot of freedom - more than most other languages. you can use it to make yourself perfectly clear, or you can make yourself incomprehensible. Just like natural languages do.