… in this recipe (scroll to the bottom), and here’s the question: Which programming language are they using in that piece of code?
My vote goes for Perl, because…
- It’s a well-known, public fact that they use Perl. In fact I have even heard someone complained the version of Perl they use is so old and stagnant they had to sort of emulate new features (already existing in newer versions of Perl)
- It can’t be PHP because of the brackets surrounding glossid
- It can’t be Python or ruby because of the ending semicolon. Ok, you can use semicolons with Python or Ruby but it’s idiotic to do such a thing when you’re free of that tyranny
- I also thought of some JSON which hadn’t been properly hidden, but again, why use a dollar sign to name a variable in javascript unless you’re using it for jQuery or something like that?
If anybody from the beeb
wants to reveal which language is it, feel free to do that… no need to use your @bbc.co.uk e-mail in the comment ;-)
Oh, and just in case they fix this little anomaly in their system, here’s a screenshot of the page. Captured with Screengrab.
By the way, I’m so hoping their database of recipes is not built upon a ton of manually typed in hashes. For the sake of their own mental health, specially the maintainers’. It worries me that the rest of recipes I have checked do not exhibit this problem. I really hope no one has to update these pages manually.
Edit: Added “in that piece of code” to clarify the question, sorry if it was too vague O:-)
Miguel
Hi Sole.
I know nothing about Perl but I’ll bet for Javascipt.
sole
No… you don’t use the ‘=>’ syntax in javascript, that’s very perl-esque. In fact the whole thing could pass as php, if only it hadn’t the square brackets [ ]. Which looks like ruby, but the semicolon makes me doubt…
Thomas
They are big enough to use more than one system and programming language. It’s perl, no one did notice the ‘undef’ ?
sole
Well, I haven’t programmed any perl myself. My only perl experience to date has been diving into perl source code and making sense of it. So that’s why it looks perl to me, but it’s good to hear someone else agreeing on it.
Although the square brackets thing is still worrying me, I just looked at perl’s reference and they do not specify hashes with square brackets.
sole
By the way, when I asked “which programming language are they using” I meant in that fragment of code, not on the whole of their systems. Of course they are using different things apart from perl!
Dan Kubb
Yup, looks like Perl to me. More specifically it’s a Hash reference probably displayed using Data::Dumper.
aurels
Yep I think it’s perl too!
sole
So, Perl = 4 votes, Javascript = 1
Perl wins!
David Craddock
Most of the web engineering/development jobs on the BBC website I’ve seen require perl as the primary language skill, so this doesn’t surprise me.
sole
Yup, that’s one of the reason why my bet was strongly influenced from the very beginning, haha.
crosvera
JPS or PERL
greets
sole
Perl has the lead!