It contributes to the notion of perl being obscure and hard to read. It's not fair, since golf is a game, not a normal way to write code, but it still reinforces stereotypes for outsiders.

It contributes to the notion of perl being obscure and hard to read. It's not fair, since golf is a game, not a normal way to write code, but it still reinforces stereotypes for outsiders.

Well, "outsiders" sometimes still confuse Perl and CGI, or even web server stuff. Who cares anyway? Some C programmers like to play obfu games too. That doesn't give C a bad reputation, though.

It contributes to the notion of perl being obscure and hard to read

or it gets the hose again.

It contributes to the notion of perl being obscure and hard to read.

For me, it contributes also to the notion that perl is hard to write - summing both: that perl is very sophisticated.

I like golf not only because it reveals dark corners of perl; it also reveals perl's tremendous ability to eliminate noise and produce dense expressions. Ultimately, golf tends to be noise, when shorter statement can not anymore be contrieved, but even those constructs - add a bit of air (white space) to them, a bit more verbosity, and many of them expand into beautiful, perfectly understandable nailing-downs of solutions to the problem at hand.

Compare

%hash = ();
{
    my @keys   = qw ( a, b, c);
    my @values = 1..3;
    for ( my $c = 0; $c <= $#keys; $c++ ) {
        $hash { $keys [$c] } = $values [ $c ];
    }
}
[download]

which is a common idiom in many languages, to

@hash { qw (a, b, c) } = 1..3;
[download]

of which the latter is the golfed code version, useable in production code, and you must admit that perl to some extent is golf - well, compared to Java anyways ;-)

Any language is "obscure and hard to read" for those that don't venture into it; and no matter whether that "obscure and hard to read" judgement is uttered as a pretext to not do so, or as a disinformed dismissive, it is just prejudice - and there being perl golf or not doesn't change that in the least.

--shmem

_($_=" "x(1<<5)."?\n".q·/)Oo.  G°\        /
                              /\_¯/(q    /
----------------------------  \__(m.====·.(_("always off the crowd"))."·
");sub _{s./.($e="'Itrs `mnsgdq Gdbj O`qkdq")=~y/"-y/#-z/;$e.e && print}

Oh my ... is it hurting the Ruby community too? They are golfing the same thing, with results that are at least just as unreadable.