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Disadvantages of TMTOWTDI

Slashdot have a story up linking to the Yahoo PHP presentation (mentioned earlier). The comments are pretty much an all out lanuage holy war, but the following comment explaining why Perl’s “There’s more than one way to do it” is a disadvantage when trying to write maintainable code caught my eye:

As they pointed out “there’s more than one way to do things”. For maintenance programming, this means that you have to know every way of doing things, or you aren’t going to be able to read all the code.

Posted 30th October 2002 at 1:32 am

This is Disadvantages of TMTOWTDI by Simon Willison, posted on 30th October 2002.

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1 comment

  1. Uhh, surely that was quite obvious... :P That is my problem, with Perl, in a nutshell. The fact that a lot of Perl hackers use a wild combination of operators etc. can make Perl damn hard to read, if only they used the readable varients all the time... but nooooo that would mean typing a whole six characters instead of two... muppets.

    Swannie - 30th October 2002 16:42 - #

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