As for the mistaken attribution, it’s just a silly mistake. But it has been fun to see how it’s spread over the net over the years.

So there.

And yes, we did have two problems…

However, it does have some big readability advantages over, say, C, at least sometimes. The graphics drawing API is to die for; as long as you don’t care about the error handling, it’s ideal for defining embedded DSLs, precisely because of its point-free higher-order nature; it has built-in arrays and dicts (even if they are fixed-size); and so on. But these are mostly a help to readability in the large, not in the small.

Anyway, this is already too long for an off-topic comment, so I’ll stop.

I’ve written full-fledged applications in PostScript – it can be done – but it’s important to remember that PostScript has been designed for machine-generated scripts. A human does not normally code in PostScript directly, but rather, they write a program in another language that produces PostScript to do what they want. (I realized this after having written said applications ) —Jeffrey

“Give a man a regular expression and he’ll match a string…
teach him to make his own regular expressions and you’ve got a man with problems.”
–me_da_clever_one

“Give a man a regular expression and he’ll match a string… but by teaching him how to create them, you’ve given him enough rope to hang himself” – Andy Hood

the unemployed programmer had a problem. “I know”, said the programmer, “I’ll just learn perl.” the unemployed programmer now had two problems.

It’s from 2000.

As a PostScript programmer, I resent that. PostScript is not inherently unreadable, but that some PostScript is unreadable where a choice has been made for it to be that way, otherwise it is highly readable.

The point being that one can write trash code in any language, so the more rational approach would be to go writing un-obfuscators. And then a “condenser” too – to remove the verbosity blown to infinity – like 10 “namespaces” and 5 classes chained just to call a single function or variable names looking like sentences and variable and function names that spell out the whole sentence.

So compared to something like …

System.Xml.Serialization.SoapIncludeAttribute.GetCustomAttribute(System.Type.GetType("System.Text.RegularExpressions")).ToString();

… I’ll take @” \((?>[^()]+|\( (?)|\)(?))*(?(DEPTH)(?!))\)” any time of the day, even if not spelleed out with spaces and newlines – as long as there’s no VB in sight )) or I have a Reflector to autoconvert it to C#.

And that regexp is not exactly quoted by chance either – it could potentially untangle the mess that the first quoted code creates )). If I’d have to define the regexp in one sentece it would be – the one that untangles the mess , while runnig fast )

People can go bitching about the “stream of bytes” till the hell freezes over but as long as different architectures and software need to talk to each other and we don’t fancy becoming slaves of one HUGE company and it’s proprietary formats – we’ll be parsing, and parsing, and parsing again. And not in Lisp since then we’d have 3 more problems . C’est la vie – pardon my French. So, I’d love to have universally available lex-and-yacc-combined parsers, in a form writable in a few lines and without callbacks, but till such times, a lil regexp will do … ))

First, I don’t know why none of that stuff is archived, I’ve never used X-No-Archive or anthing like it.

Second: yeah, I was repurposing the older “sed” quote, which I didn’t come up with myself, but that seemed appropriate as “sed” is where I learned regexps in the first place. (And I will pay Perl another backhanded complement: “it’s not as bad as sed.”)

Third: obviously I got Kelly’s joke about “streams of bytes”, uh, that’s why I quoted it. It’s funny, and it makes the point (which I fully agree with) that the decades-old Unix “pipe” model is just plain dumb, because it forces you to think of everything as serializable text, even things that are fundamentally not text, or that are not sensibly serializable.

Fourth: I like PostScript, and it’s a safe bet that I’ve written more and hairier PostScript by hand than anyone reading this… but the syntax is as close to “write-only” as in any language I’ve ever used. Anyone who defends PostScript as being “readable” is a monster raving loony.

Fifth: these days I use Perl a lot, but I still don’t like it. So there.