Perl is the most hated programming language

[anon75430791]

@GoatCheezInfrno

I haven’t written a line of COBOL since I was in junior college 30+ years ago.

It was 1999 for me. And I had the hardest time of it at first, because all I’d taken was C++ courses prior. For whatever reason, I just couldn’t wrap my head around it.

But after about 3 days, it just clicked, and I got it. It was like going Sane in a Crazy World. Stop thinking like a coder, and start thinking like a non-coder.

I recall my instructor being confused because I had misread the first assignment, and turned in 2 pages of code for sorting a text file. Seemed like a reasonable assignment to me, after all that C++. Then I saw how everyone else had just read the book, and saw there’s a CobolSort function that you can get done in about a dozen lines.

Instructor’s response was, “You wrote a sort?? In COBOL?!”

@GoatCheezInfrno

it really is pretty straightforward

Yeah, pretty much! I’d hate to have to work with it day-in, day-out though.

[marence]

@anon75430791

I’d hate to have to work with it day-in, day-out though.

My brother has made a living as an engineer fixing COBOL since 1988. He’s not retiring any time soon.

[CapnCrunch]

I think readability is mostly about good coding practice - and also familiarity. However, Perl is generally a bit too compact for my taste. Plus, I don’t really like variable prefixes, and anything where basic operators get overridden starts giving me a headache.