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Comment by jschwartzi

Yeah, I've got a Perl codebase that's conservatively tens of thousands of lines, and it's honestly a struggle to write anything in it that isn't a big ball of mud. There's about 50 different ways to do anything in the language, the syntax is infuriatingly obtuse, and you can't rely on any documentation because it will recommend doing things that experts don't recommend doing.

The system is from like 2013 and still going, but I really wish I could rewrite it in a language I can actually train people on in a reasonable amount of time. It took the one junior I have about 6 months to get to the point where he could read the syntax without tearing his hair out. It's not really built to create maintainable structures.

The libraries and stuff are full of opinionated little "gotchas." As an example, the Test::Simple module will throw errors if you use a number to title a test which is infuriating when you're writing a test which tests all the numbers in the space of acceptable or possible inputs.

parent jschwartzi 6 years ago

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