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Perl vs. Random Syntax

Just noticed something that might be interesting to folks here, the title is "An Empirical Comparison of the Accuracy Rates of Novices using the Quorum, Perl, and Randomo Programming Languages" and the abstract finishes with "...Results showed that while Quorum users were afforded significantly greater accuracy compared to those using Perl and Randomo, Perl users were unable to write programs more accurately than those using a language designed by chance."

http://www.cs.siue.edu/~astefik/papers/StefikPlateau2011.pdf

By CoHi at 2011-10-28 10:32 | LtU Forum | previous forum topic | next forum topic | other blogs | 8224 reads

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Maybe it's because...

Perl Cannot Be Parsed.

By Z-Bo at Fri, 2011-10-28 15:59 | login or register to post comments

Funny article

It is a fascinating and amusing article. There is a level of logic to Perl syntax, but it is generally the opposite of the Law of Least Astonishment. I've got 18 years of Perl under my belt and I have to admit that when I try a new construction I just test to see what syntax is going to work.

Perl is not a good first language. So I'm not sure the paper is being entirely fair. All the answers are verbose long winded. A more Perlish kind of answer for example to task1 would be something like:

my ($x,$y) = (175.3, 'false');
$y = ("still false","true")[$x>100];

And because of the reduction in the number of statements I think the error count would drop.

By JeffB at Mon, 2011-10-31 19:15 | login or register to post comments