Simon Willison’s Weblog

Disadvantages of TMTOWTDI

30th October 2002

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.