I have posted this somewhere before but I will like to see/hear the views of the guys on nairaland

Really quick, can you tell me what this is?

-pl s!.!y$IVCXL426(-:$XLMCDIVX$dfor$$_.=5x$&*8%29628;$$$_=$_!egfor-4e3, y/iul-}/-$+ /%s''$';*_=eval

I’ll give you a hint- It’s not a cat walking across my keyboard. If that was your first guess, though, we’re at least on the same page. This was the winning entry in a game of Perl Golf: The problem was to write a Roman Numeral Calculator in the fewest characters possible. Submissions can be found here http://www.fonality.com/golf/post_mortem.cgi?id=1 . Now, this is an amazing piece of code. The person who wrote it is clearly very skilled. The fact that Perl makes code like that possible is pretty impressive. The problem here is that people write code like this outside of PERL golf, and think to themselves, “it’s only one line, so it must have fewer bugs than a 50 line solution”. Really? Because if I had to debug one, I’d have definitely gone with the 50 line solution.

Writing unmaintanable code does not reduce the bug count for a project. A friend of mine coined a term for code like that- “Write-Only Code”- a takeoff on the permissions you can set with chmod. Think about it: Readable, writeable, and executable. Shouldn’t code be all three?

Another quick example:

(0/:l)(_+_)

The first time I saw this snippet, I thought someone was, via emoticons, trying to re-enact the facial expression one wore when seeing Ghosts for the first time. It’s not actually a story told by emoticon. It’s a piece of scala code that sums the elements in a list. And I just don’t see it as having been easier to write than a for loop. It’s definitely not as maintainable. This piece of code, actually, prompted a conversation with a friend about holding a “code or emoticon” contest, but we really couldn’t come up with any serious contenders to this one. Maybe some Perl Golfers could throw their hat in the ring?

So wot do you think, should code be readable, writable and executable or we should go with these "Write-Only-Code"?

I believe code must be readable, writable and executable.

Someone once described Perl as "Line noise".

Such code as above should only be seen in contests (Perl Golfing, etc.) and never in the real world.

Line Noise indeed

Yep! Llllliiiiiiiiiiiiiiiinnnnnnnnnnneeeeeeeee noooooiiiiiissssseeee! It's a powerful language though!

the area of programming where you'll usually see similar combination of characters is regex

Sincerely I tried to learn regex, but I think I prefer to copy and paste it rather than write it myself

javarules:

Sincerely I tried to learn regex, but I think I prefer to copy and paste it rather than write it myself

I always copy and paste the regex for my both Flash and HTML form handler validation parsing with PHP email results.

Nothing wrong with copy/paste regex instead of write it---to avoid too many syntax errors.

@usurpy @javarules

Sincerely I tried to learn regex, but I think I prefer to copy and paste it rather than write it myself
I always copy and paste the regex for my both Flash and HTML form handler validation parsing with PHP email results.
Nothing wrong with copy/paste regex instead of write it---to avoid too many syntax errors

I think you both should takes some time to learn regex and pattern matching to better understand and write customisable regular expressions. Gosh!, even the Java documentation as a tutorial section on REGEX.

No hating.

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Proud to be a JAND(Java Nigerian Developers) . Want to join, ??

Thanks javaprince, how I wish I have the time to do that, with projects flying around here and here and deadlines to meet.I wish I had learnt it back in sku.

tx anyway.

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JAND (Proudly Java Proudly Nigerian)

It has always been nice to know more about AUTOMATA and graduate to REGULAR EXPRESSION and Pattern machining simulation then you will know that jargon