sorting pathnames by basename

[bscott at ntisys.com]

On Mon, 19 Aug 2002, at 7:18pm, Derek D. Martin wrote:
> Perl seems to have gone out of its way to work like other common Unix
> tools/languages (shell scripting, C, sed/grep), in others it seems to go
> out of its way to do things in such a way as to be as confusing as
> possible.

  How is that different from any other language?  Most languages borrow from
other languages, and yet still do things their own way.  Compare C++, Java,
and C#, for example.

> An example of this would be the equivalent of a structure in C (or Pascal
> or whatever).

  This is an accident.  In general, Perl was not designed -- it evolved.  
It started small, and then creeping featurism ran rampant on it.  Much like
Unix, there are a great many things in Perl that don't make a lot of sense
unless you know the history behind them.

> The people who like to program Perl seem to have a propensity to prefer to
> write code which takes advantage of all the obscure features, and
> generally to write code which is unreadable.

  I think you put far too much weight on the "recreational hackers" who
favor neat tricks.  It is one thing to fire off one-liners because one can;  
it is quite another to do so in "real life".  It is quite possible to write
professional-quality, well-documented, non-obscure Perl code.  The fact that
some people take pleasure from not doing so does not make Perl a bad
language.  And while it does seem like the Perl community has a large
percentage of people who like recreational hacking, I think that just
reflects Perl's roots as a language that was evolved through usage.

-- 
Ben Scott <bscott at ntisys.com>
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