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Why Perl?

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11–20 of 118 posts

Re: Why Perl?

#11

Post by TheRevoltingX »

Hear hear, Perl developer here. I've used C/C++/ObjC/Java/Erlang and I just love Perl for gluing it all together.

I must admit my stack is outdated, I still use CGI::Application, though I love Moose. I haven't kept us since catalyst, etc started to appear. CGI::Application works really well for me.

The other day I implemented push notification and geolocation bases functionality for a client in a couple of days.

To them it looks like magic, but to me it's just awesome that there are libraries in cpan to do just about everything making it a real time saver.

Re: Why Perl?

#12

Post by gatlin »

I've said it before and I'll say it again: other imperative scripting languages feel like incomplete subsets of Perl. And the community is fantastic.

Re: Why Perl?

#14

Post by superasn »

Perl is also an awesome language for web automation and testing, esp with WWW:Mechanize and LWP.

Also the kind of freedom or strictness Perl offers to users is just unique. It's like slider on top. Building a website or project? then use strict, and warnings and objects. Want to write a quick and dirty csv parser? well just paste your code in the command line. How cool is that!

Re: Why Perl?

#15

Post by scott_s »

lawn wrote: post #8
rhizome31 wrote: post #2

This is really just a checklist that can be applied to any language. So yes, why not Perl after all...

Hmm let's see. "Perl Programmers love their language." Sadly not true enough for many languages. Does PHP programmers love their language like Perl programmers do for example? Somehow I doubt it. "True Freedom" Perl is free and open source and most code is too. How does that compare to Java or the microsoft stack? "Great Community" There are a lot of great communities surrounding most languages to be sure, but it's a…

Sadly not true enough for many languages.

But I think equally true for the languages considered its successors: Ruby and Python.

Re: Why Perl?

#17

Post by 16s »

The thing I admire most about Perl is that the libraries written for it tend to be more complete than what I've seen in other, similar languages. I think this is due to its age. This may not seem important, but when you need a complete implementation of something you'll likely find it in a Perl library before you will in a Python or Ruby library... just my experience.

Re: Why Perl?

#18

Post by Mithaldu »

Kototama wrote: post #5
Mithaldu wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Honestly, the only point there that applies to any language is the "freedom" one. The rest are, with varying margins, real differentiators. Especially the CPAN ecosystem one. No other language has that.

What are the differences between CPAN and, for instance, Maven repositories?

Next time i'll make the ecosystem bit blinking and pink.

Maven repositories are just that: Repositories. They store file and display some metadata.

CPAN shows documentation from the code of a distribution itself. It also provides a bugtracker. When installing things from CPAN via cpan on the command line, the tests of that dist are run. Users can opt to install Test::Reporter, which then uploads those test results to cpantesters.org. Many people do this, across many OSes and Perl versions across the globe. Authors of dists get emails of failures. Users can look at nice matrices displaying the passes and failures on their platform combination. On failures regression analysis is performed automatically to try and pinpoint possible failure reasons. Since metacpan there is also a public API to an ElasticSearch database containing all the metadata about CPAN dists and their authors. So you can for example, find all dists written by authors living in your town.

Et cetera.

I could go on, but i think i made my point.

Re: Why Perl?

#19

Post by Mithaldu »

blibble wrote: post #6
Kototama wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What are the differences between CPAN and, for instance, Maven repositories?

indeed, or pypi, or PEAR, and I'm sure ruby has something similar too

All of those have a long way to go yet to match the CPAN ecosystem. See my reply above.

Re: Why Perl?

#20

Post by kablamo »

rhizome31 wrote: post #2

This is really just a checklist that can be applied to any language. So yes, why not Perl after all...

There are lots of great languages. I think we can learn from each other. Perl has a lot of problems but also a lot of strengths. CPAN is one of its strengths.

Compare CPAN: https://metacpan.org/module/Moose::Manual

Then compare with other repositories from other languages: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1693529/list-of-top-repos...

CPAN does

* Documentation

* Historical versions of libraries

* Search

* Source code

* Integrated bug tracker

* Integrated review system

* Links to repositories

* Integrated automated tests regularly run against hundreds of machines/operating systems/perl versions.

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