[hobojones]

I work on a large, legacy codebase (the oldest modules date from the mid-nineties) that's slowly being rewritten from Perl into Python. A handful of developers have been involved with the project from the beginning. Looking at the long term contributors, readable or un-readable code seems to be more about the person than the language. Unsurprisingly, the person who produced the most unreadable, unmaintainable code is now doing the same in a new Python only project.

I've always tried to look at programming in a similar manner as writing research papers, your ideas are no good if no one understands how they're put to paper. Explicitly stating your intentions is better than assuming the reader knows the subject matter. If something is clever, overly-compact or your reviewer expresses confusion, rewrite it or at least spend an extra line or two in explanation.

At the language level, I miss Perl's handling of regexps and shell commands (which consist of large amounts of this codebase). Python requires a fair amount of overhead to handle both and always feels a little clunky. While I'm far more fluent in Python, I typically reach for Perl when needing to quickly handle log files, automate shell tasks, and prototype ideas. On the flip side, now that Python supports type hinting, function signatures are much more valuable, and overall I feel I can write far more robust tests in Python than Perl. Given that the direction of the project is to move from a collection of one-off scripts that just kept on growing to a tested, maintainable, modular codebase, Python is the better choice.

[alexpotato]

> Looking at the long term contributors, readable or un-readable code seems to be more about the person than the language. Unsurprisingly, the person who produced the most unreadable, unmaintainable code is now doing the same in a new Python only project.

I would totally agree.

I learned Perl after first learning Basic(and Visual Basic) then Java.

Coming from Java meant that I always tried to use clear variable names, good comments, broke my code into small and simple functions etc. I repeatedly had people say to me "Wow! I didn't know you could do that in Perl!"

A lot of Perl's bad reputation came from sysadmins and other busy folks who either weren't familiar with good syntax or were in a hurry and basically were playing Perl Golf to get things done quickly. This is probably where the line "Perl is a write only language" came from.

I will concede that Python and it's forced indenting leads to much easier to read code for beginners. That being said, trying to understand what's going on with advanced Pandas usage written by Numpy wizards is no walk in the park either.

I also totally agree that the Perl one liner is still my go to even though I do everything else in Python these days.

[daotoad]

Based on your comments, here are some things you might find interesting:

Recent Perl versions have function signatures.

Have you tried the Test2 test suite? It’s a tremendous improvement over the previous system.

Type::Tiny is an amazing library that provides a rather nice type system.

[bsder]

> Looking at the long term contributors, readable or un-readable code seems to be more about the person than the language.

The biggest problem I have with Perl is like C++, the language is so stupidly big that every single programmer knows a different subset of the language.

I used to bump into this problem when I was interviewing for VLSI jobs and somebody would always do the "Let's talk about Perl" round. I was quite fluent at Perl at the time, and there would ALWAYS be some idiom that would stump me.

I solved this by bringing my own Perl program on a printout with me--I also brought the Python version of the same program with me. Suddenly, the interviewer was in MY subset of Perl and almost always went "Oh, you're a lot better at Perl and programming than I am" instead of dinging me for not knowing weird Perl trivia.