Why I Use Perl: Reliability
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Why I Use Perl: Reliability
1–10 of 196 posts
Re: Why I Use Perl: Reliability
#2Perl is like C++ for the Web. Bulletproof. Unless you intentionally remove the kevlar plates. But then it's on you ;)
Re: Why I Use Perl: Reliability
#3Reliability? Sure. Readability? Not so much.
Re: Why I Use Perl: Reliability
#4Perl is like C++ for the Web. Bulletproof. Unless you intentionally remove the kevlar plates. But then it's on you ;)
I heard some else say Perl is COBOL of the web. (COBOL is also used by banks for it's reliability)
Re: Why I Use Perl: Reliability
#5I remain unconvinced. Should the amount of effort that it costs to update the interpreter really be the main consideration?
Re: Why I Use Perl: Reliability
#6I remain unconvinced. Should the amount of effort that it costs to update the interpreter really be the main consideration?
As I wrote, it's one of the reasons I use Perl.
Re: Why I Use Perl: Reliability
#7I remain unconvinced. Should the amount of effort that it costs to update the interpreter really be the main consideration?
> I remain unconvinced. Should the amount of effort that it costs to update the interpreter really be the main consideration?
No, it shouldnt. But it's a proxy measure for the engineering and productisation effort which goes in.
It's relatively easy to get features in quickly with breakage. It's easy to have stability with no change.
It's relatively hard to continuously improve with good reliability and back-compat. Perl was a major leader for automated testing since before TDD was a buzzword.
Modern perl is a cool language with a great OO model and a shitty threading system (seriously, use multiproc if you want concurrency or just go async with one of the eventing systems).
It has some serious warts (no implicit deref of references, the scalar/list context is arguably more trouble that it's worth) and suffers from an image problem.
But it's a bulletproof, fast, widely deployed, portable, actively improving scripting language which doesn't have a lot of the warts of it's competitors (broken lexical scoping, problematic object model, poor performance etc). Oh "and CPAN" (ObMention)
Re: Why I Use Perl: Reliability
#8Reliability? Sure. Readability? Not so much.
Well you know, some people tell me Haskell is readable, others say C++ is readable, I tend to argue.
Re: Why I Use Perl: Reliability
#9Any language would be improved if it had Perl's testing and library culture. Two things it's absolute unsurpassed at so far.
Re: Why I Use Perl: Reliability
#10Reliability? Sure. Readability? Not so much.
Such a tired argument. Perl has its issues, but you can write unreadable code in any language.
Perl is my set of power tools that sit in my basement for weeks until I get them out and fix/make/do something. And what the OP said is correct. I can install new versions and run 10 year old code without issues.