Line noise: parentheses

1st of June, 2009

I’ve been discussing how bad perl code looks and I’m a bit surprised: I consider () more noisy than $, %, @ and friends, while the people I discuss this with, really likes parentheses. Consider this:

push(@text, sprintf('I got %i foos', int(shift(@{ $obj->get_foo() }))));

Versus:

push @text, sprintf 'I got %i foos', int shift @{ $obj->get_foo };

I don’t understand how the first one is less noisy than the second (!). I also don’t understand how you can maintain or read the first one.