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0 pointsbenreesman17y ago0 comments

It bears mentioning that you've created this account for the specific purpose of writing this comment, perhaps you are the author the blog post in question?

I don't dispute that I make an appeal to authority in the hopes of diffusing a debate that I've already had and don't care to have again. You would be ill-advised to premise your argument on the supposition that I'm bluffing, however, as I am not.

I did not refuse to substantiate my claim, I merely indicated that said claim has been substantiated in excruciating detail (by myself and others) elsewhere, ad nauseam. If your legitimate interest is to have access to that information, and not to take cheap psuedo-textual pot shots at my well-intentioned comments then I will gladly reprise them for you, at any level of detail you desire. You've made no such request (as someone interested in defending Perl, or rather attacking its attackers, you most likely have all of that information already).

True syntactic abstraction can take multiple forms, but basically it means CL-style macros. It means the ability to introduce arbitrary language constructs indistinguishable from built-in ones. Perl advocates claim that Perl 5's glaring deficiencies are not a problem because there are CPAN libraries that address them, providing things like try/catch blocks. This (and other similar band aids for things like object-orientation) are frequently implemented using Perl's relatively weak support for syntactic abstraction (using subroutine prototypes, but then again, you already knew that).

I'll be the first to admit that I'm a weak debater and an even weaker writer. But my intentions in writing that comment were entirely sincere, and I am in fact capable of backing it up. You on the other hand are attempting to use your superior dialectic to attack the weakness of my writing, asking questions you already know the answer to, in the hopes that any passers-by can be confused into missing the forest for the trees.

It is profoundly ironic that your predictable decision to bring out the old chestnut (ad-hominem) was in a parenthesis that begins "I could...". It is even more ironic that you wind up by blasting me as "inspecific, unsupported advocacy" given that you are coming to the de facto defense of an article which is a battle cry for just that!

What is going on here?

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3 comments · 1 top-level

chromatic17y ago· 2 in thread

If true syntactic abstraction is CL-style macros, then almost no language has true syntactic abstraction. It seems odd for you to single out Perl in that category -- as you should look at Devel::Declare, which is an improvement over the core module Filter::Simple, both of which provide syntactic abstraction for Perl 5. (In particular, MooseX::Declare seems like a very good candidate to address your criticisms both of Perl's syntactic abstraction and its rather simplistic default OO model using something other than merely subroutine prototypes.)

If you're capable of backing up your complaints, please feel free to link to previous discussions, rather than making everyone go look for them on their own. A few moments of research on your part would save the rest of the Internet countless time.

... and no, no matter how much you'd like to invalidate my comments by arguing that I wrote the post in question, I'm not and have never been Matt S. Trout.

benreesmanOP17y ago

I'm not singling out Perl for lacking syntactic abstraction, I'm pointing out that a horribly brain-damaged language (sigils dereferencing multiple variable namespaces? don't even get me started) cannot be saved without it. Modern Perl practice seems to always involve CPAN modules that attempt to rewrite the syntax of the language one way or another, frequently with prototypes.

I've commented on HN about this before (admittedly less tactfully than I would have liked to), you can read some of my previous comments at:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=157183 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=157323

For another (slightly more inflammatory but no less valid) view on the subject there's the classic:

http://steve.yegge.googlepages.com/ancient-languages-perl

I'm not trying to invalidate your argument by insinuating that you are the OP, merely pointing out that only a coward hides behind a shell account to carry out an argument founded in trickery and logical fallacy. If you want another reply from me you will have to show up as yourself, I don't think I'll exchange niceties with your puppet any more.

chromatic17y ago

I would have thought that Googling "chromatic perl" is easier than throwing more ad hominem ("coward", "shell", "trickery", "[sock] puppet") implications around. Shame on you; your linked posts had much more substance to them (though of course, recommending Python or Ruby over Perl seems disingenuous after praising Perl for getting lexical scoping and first-class functions correct).

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