Linked by Thom Holwerda on Tue 11th May 2010 23:17 UTC, submitted by PLan
"Lately, the Perl language has had less buzz surrounding it than many other languages and development environments, but Perl is still a key component on the Internet. For this guest post, we asked Jeff Hobbs, Director of Engineering at ActiveState, to weigh in on the topic."
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Member since:2005-07-20
Maybe, if that's what you're used to.
Personally I can do more of what I want with a few lines of Perl than the same lines of Python or Ruby.
If I was writing software for long-term use I'd probably use Python or C++.
For some quick code or for analyzing and reporting I'd go with Perl.
RE[2]: don't really agree
by vivainio on Wed 12th May 2010 20:57
in reply to "RE: don't really agree"
Member since:2008-12-26
Personally I can do more of what I want with a few lines of Perl than the same lines of Python or Ruby.
The amount of characters is not what counts - rather, the amount of time it takes to write/debug the script, and the amount it will take to modify it later.
For some quick code or for analyzing and reporting I'd go with Perl.
Out of curiosity, what aspect of perl makes it preferable to python in this area? Regex support is pretty much the same, so it must be the built in reporting features?
One thing I think makes python preferable to perl even for the "dirty work" is the exception handling. In perl you'll either implement error handling yourself ("or die") or fail without explanation.
RE[2]: don't really agree
by WorknMan on Thu 13th May 2010 01:27
in reply to "RE: don't really agree"
Member since:2005-11-13
Personally I can do more of what I want with a few lines of Perl than the same lines of Python or Ruby.
But the difference between Python (and probably Ruby as well) is that, after I get finished writing Python code, I can actually read it 3 months later
Sure, it's possible to write Perl code that isn't write-only, just as it's possible to write a Java GUI app that isn't slow, but when a language makes it extremely easy to do the wrong thing, what can you do? As for Perl6 not being the successor to Perl5, I'm sure some of you will think me an idiot for applying some common sense here, but WHY CALL IT PERL6 IF IT ISN'T PERL5'S SUCCESSOR? If I could, I would embed an image here of Captain Picard doing the facepalm.
Edited 2010-05-13 01:30 UTC
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Member since:
2006-02-05
IMO, CPAN and the inertia of existing scripts is all perl really has going for it at this point. If you don't need that, you either go python or ruby for general purpose scripting nowadays. Not even making a judgement on whether thats a good or bad thing, but it really is the way things are now.