Re: Perl is a post-modern aesthetic language

There are many levels and facets to defining asthetics. Someone who appreciates the taking of life at face value might say about a Picasso painting, "Why are all the people so ugly? Why are they distorted?" And the person who enjoys the Picasso might be bored with the simple grandeur of an Ansel Adams photograph.

When I look at well written Perl code, I appreciate the elegance. The bigger picture is quite elegant. I see that beauty in constructs such as the Schwartzian Transform, file operations, and so on. And yet when you look at the individual trees in the Perl forest you see things like s/([\w\s]+)(?!\d)/lc $1/eg; and quickly realize that while the solution (the forest) is elegant, the leaves and branches (the syntax) are a little shabby. This isn't to condemn Perl in any way. I happen to like the terse nature of the language. But I'm pointing out that to one who doesn't look at the bigger picture so much as the details of implementation, Perl may be asthetically displeasing.

We all look at art and science in different ways. Naturally when someone asks the Monastery how they feel about Perl, you're going to get a lot of enthusiastic hurrahs. Bach inspires such favorable reaction among those who enjoy classical baroque music. And yet his complex style may not be fully appreciated by the likes of Charlie "Bird" Parker. On the other hand, Bach would probably not find much pleasure in Parker's harsh style of jazz either. Me, I like them both, but that's just me. ;)

We happen to mostly be Perl proponents here. And from my perspective, it's easy to see why Perl enjoys this kind of a following. After all, I find it asthetically pleasing. ;) I wouldn't be surprised to hear that there are people out there who find Lisp (or insert some other language here) pleasing too. ;)

Dave

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Re^2: Perl is a post-modern aesthetic language
by hardburn (Abbot) on Jan 17, 2005 at 15:48 UTC

Hey, sometimes I write LISP that happens to be parsed by perl :)

my @DB_FIELDS = qw/ foo bar baz /;

my $sql = 'INSERT INTO table (';
$sql .= join( ', ', @DB_FIELDS );
$sql .= ') VALUES (';
$sql .= join( ', ', 
    map( '?', @DB_FIELDS )
);
$sql .= ')';
[download]

OK, so I could have used the x operator instead of map, and it doesn't quite have the extreme paren-nesting that LISP does (in fact, it's possible to get rid of many parens while maintaining correctness). I have some more extreme examples that make you swear you fell into another interpreter, but I can't think of them ATM.

In any case, LISP is remarkable (in its orginal form) for being an incrediably small language without falling down a Turing-tarpit. It's arguably more minimalistic than BF, and you can still write real programs in it without tearing your hair out.

"There is no shame in being self-taught, only in not trying to learn in the first place." -- Atrus, Myst: The Book of D'ni.

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