introspection (and Perl 6)

[chromatic]

On Wednesday 23 January 2008 07:13:10 David Cantrell wrote:

> Yes, the two plain ^ operators are different (not that that's a problem
> - we already have - for both negation and subtraction).  Even so, having
> that many different ^-ish operators does strike me as being at odds with
> the idea that good code is easy to read.  I think I'm going to end up
> grumbling as much about the ^ character in perl 6 code as I do about the
> * and & characters in C.  They might make the code quicker to type and
> more compact, but they do that at the expense of readability *even for
> an experienced programmer in that language*.

L’Académie française is ------>

Did you have trouble learning English when you encountered the borrowed 
prefix "man" which means "hand" or "with the hand" in words such 
as "manipulate" and "mandible" and then ran across words such as "human"?

I'm sure that somehow you coped... as you learned the language.

Of course a new language is difficult to read for people who don't know the 
language.  Why is this a surprise?  Now you have several options if you want 
to write code that you care about in that language:

1) write baby code
2) hire people who know the language
3) hire people who can learn the language
4) whinge on the Internet about how reading operators you don't know is Just 
Too Hard

The benefits of 2 and 3, especially in the context of Perl 6, is that it's 
easy to write source code analysis tools that can explain exactly what each 
operator is and what it does for the purpose of learnability.

1 is an option if you can set coding standards for your projects.

-- c