最近Stack Overflow上有一群讨厌perl的人,所以我想我应该把我的“关于你最喜欢的语言你讨厌的五件事”的问题带到Stack Overflow上。拿你最喜欢的语言来说,告诉我你讨厌它的五件事。这些可能只是让你烦恼的事情,承认的设计缺陷,公认的性能问题,或任何其他类别。你只需要讨厌它,它必须是你最喜欢的语言。
不要拿它和其他语言比较,也不要谈论你已经讨厌的语言。不要用你最喜欢的语言谈论你喜欢的事情。我只是想听到你讨厌但能容忍的东西,这样你就可以使用所有其他的东西,我想听到你希望别人使用的语言。
每当有人试图把他们最喜欢的语言强加给我时,我就会问这个问题,有时是面试问题。如果有人找不出他最喜欢的工具的5个缺点,那他对它还不够了解,不能提倡它,也不能利用它赚大钱。他还没有在足够多的不同情况下使用它来充分探索它。他把它作为一种文化或宗教来倡导,这意味着如果我不选择他最喜欢的技术,我就错了。
我不在乎你用什么语言。不想使用特定的语言?那就不要。你通过尽职调查做出了明智的选择,但仍然没有使用它?好吧。有时正确的答案是“你有一个强大的编程团队,有良好的实践和丰富的Bar经验。改成Foo是愚蠢的。”
This is a good question for code reviews too. People who really know a codebase will have all sorts of suggestions for it, and those who don't know it so well have non-specific complaints. I ask things like "If you could start over on this project, what would you do differently?" In this fantasy land, users and programmers get to complain about anything and everything they don't like. "I want a better interface", "I want to separate the model from the view", "I'd use this module instead of this other one", "I'd rename this set of methods", or whatever they really don't like about the current situation. That's how I get a handle on how much a particular developer knows about the codebase. It's also a clue about how much of the programmer's ego is tied up in what he's telling me.
憎恨并不是衡量人们了解多少的唯一尺度,但我发现它是一个相当不错的尺度。他们讨厌的事情也让我知道他们对这个话题的思考有多好。
下面是关于Perl 5的更多内容,来自创建了大量Perl模块,特别是在Moose上工作过的人的观点。
The horrible brokenness that is overloading and tied variables. Both of these features are a failed attempt to allow transparent extension to the built-in types.
They both fail in various ways, and require module authors like myself to either implement horrible hacks to support them, or to say "never pass an overloaded object to the foo() method". Neither alternative is really acceptable.
Lack of proper hooks into the compilation process and the meta-model. Moose in general, and role usage in particular, could be made much safer if the Perl core allowed us to affect the compilation process via a sane API that allowed us to hook into the meta-model (packages, classes, etc.)
Lack of named parameters built into the language. Instead, everyone reinvents this. It's annoying.
Similarly, lack of optional types. I don't want a static language, but the ability to specify types and constraints, particularly on function/method parameters, would be great. Perl 6 gets this right. Types are optional, but very rich, and there's no fundamental difference between built-in and user-defined types.
The backwards compatibility police. This is more of a cultural issue. A number of the above issues can never really be fixed, since Perl 5 has a very strong commitment to backwards compatibility. So even if something were to be added that effectively replaced the current ball of shit that is tie and overloading, those features will never be removed. Of course, backwards compatibility is also one of Perl 5's greatest strengths.
Bonus hate: Perl's built-in exception mechanism is a joke. The fact that exceptions may be a string or object makes for an eternity of fiddly exception-catching code, and the lack of a catch in the language syntax is the wart on the wart.
Common Lisp
conditions aren't classes (since classes came later), even though their interface is almost identical
some of the names are just weird, e.g., flet / labels (only difference: scope), and defvar / defparameter (only difference: behavior when already defined), or any of the bit-twiddling functions (dpb, ldb, etc.)
packages are ... really hard to get right -- every time I think I understand them, they don't do what I want
built-in data structures and functions aren't as generic as they could be (e.g., why can't I define my own hash function portably?)
multiple namespaces for functions, variables, etc. (I'm not opposed to this in principle, but CL made it too complex; Norvig has said he can't tell from the spec but there appear to be at least 7 namespaces)
Erlang不在此列表中。在我最喜欢的语言中,但有一些缺陷是肯定的:
Syntax. This includes the 3 terminating tokens (,;.) and aesthetics, but more generally on how the semantic meaning of the code is expressed in text. An example is on how all lowercase tokens are atoms, so to refer to a function you can't just name it, you have to fun my_function/1, and ?PRECEDE_CONSTANTS_WITH_QUESTION_MARKS. Coming from Scheme, Haskell, etc. you just wish you could use a name.
Library support is lame. This is mostly external libraries, but even the old standard library. Newer versions of Erlang have sensible POSIX regexes, but the old one had a pretty horrible library for basic string manipulation. You also never know when you're getting the value, or {ok, Value}.
Related: non-uniform tools for building and distribution. Ruby has gem and rake, RSpec. Perl has CPAN. I'm unaware of decent equivalents in Erlang.
The few Erlang specific tools are pretty strange. Mnesia is a great database, but coming from SQL you have lots of trivialities to learn. Same with the documentation @spec, which has a strange way of describing signatures.
Often the functional paradigm hurts when you just want that little bit of mutation. Supposing you want a Hash Table, you can't just hack it as in Scheme, or SML. ets and dets alleviate some of the pain, but not much.
第六,奖金:
模块的导入和导出语法是一堆失败,这与Java的80多行导入语句没有什么不同。
综上所述,Erlang是一种乐趣^_^