Unleash the smug Lisp weenies! After all, Perl's stability is minimal compared with Common Lisp's.
Ah yes, SBCL, the runtime that manages memory with a signal handler on SEGV. Stable!
Why I Use Perl: Reliability
61–70 of 196 posts
Re: Why I Use Perl: Reliability
#62Reliability? Sure. Readability? Not so much.
This is getting rapidly less true. Perl used to get dinged for having "funny" syntax like the prefix glyphs on variables, infix if, etc... That was in a world where the language mindshare was dominated by Java, which made its name by simplifying C++ and not making any weird or unconventional choices in syntax. These days all the cool languages have funny syntax (hell, Ruby lifted most of perl's weirdness directly), s…
The feel I get from the "scala community" is that we've realised that fancy operators are a mistake; most operations are better expressed as english words rather than the ~/s of our foolish youth. I wonder if we'll see that happen with other upcoming languages.
Re: Why I Use Perl: Reliability
#63Earlier quoted context omitted.
The worst problem with Perl as a language is hiring for a good Perl programmer. It's easy to hire a mediocre Perl programmer, mind you, sometimes even a mediocre programmer who's really good at Perl specifically and knows all the packaging tricks and whatnot so he can get through the interview before falling apart on the job, but really hard to find the good ones. It just doesn't have much mindshare at the moment (ug…
I'm interested. I love Perl, and would love to work for a company that requires me to program in Perl. Care to share which companies are these? Thanks.
If you're in Los Angeles, check out http://perl.la/. I know my employer (oversee.net) is hiring, and I'm pretty sure many of the others on there are as well.
Re: Why I Use Perl: Reliability
#647-10 years ago, Perl was my daily bread and butter. It was the language I used the most, and not only did it supplant a lot of C code, but was the optimal scripting solution.
Now, for me, Ruby has supplanted Perl in nearly every conceivable way -- OO Perl was always painful, and I do not miss ever having to bless a refrent again…
Re: Why I Use Perl: Reliability
#65The article makes a good point. But, the title (and comments here) infer that there are a mountain of reasons why people don't use it. Is there a compelling argument against that mountain, or is this just a reminder that Ruby/Python/Closure/Scala communities would be well-served to try and improve in this area?
The worst problem with Perl as a language is hiring for a good Perl programmer. It's easy to hire a mediocre Perl programmer, mind you, sometimes even a mediocre programmer who's really good at Perl specifically and knows all the packaging tricks and whatnot so he can get through the interview before falling apart on the job, but really hard to find the good ones. It just doesn't have much mindshare at the moment (ug…
Are there really any compelling reasons to use Perl over Ruby for greenfield projects (i.e. not legacy maintenance)? I've written maybe a dozen medium-length Perl scripts (but nothing very large) before I got into Ruby, and I can't seem to think of anything that Perl does that can't be done at least as well in Ruby.
Honestly not trying to start a religious war here - just curious - and I think it's fair to compare the two languages as they are both runtime interpreted and have relatively similar characteristics (and obviously Ruby took a good dose of inspiration from Perl, anyway).
Re: Why I Use Perl: Reliability
#66Any language would be improved if it had Perl's testing and library culture. Two things it's absolute unsurpassed at so far.
Does ruby not have the same level of both?
Re: Why I Use Perl: Reliability
#67I remain unconvinced. Should the amount of effort that it costs to update the interpreter really be the main consideration?
Not at all. You shouldn't be updating the interpreter unless you have to, and then it should be done through your distro's package management and standard upstream path. The OP seems to think it's a good idea to upgrade his production code to the newest stable interpreter just because it was released. This is a recipe for disaster. Sometimes there are just hidden bugs you don't see until a weird use case blows up you…
The OP seems to think it's a good idea to upgrade his production code to the newest stable interpreter just because it was released.
You're putting words in my mouth and knocking down the resulting strawman. I upgraded for Unicode and performance improvements.
Re: Why I Use Perl: Reliability
#68Earlier quoted context omitted.
The worst problem with Perl as a language is hiring for a good Perl programmer. It's easy to hire a mediocre Perl programmer, mind you, sometimes even a mediocre programmer who's really good at Perl specifically and knows all the packaging tricks and whatnot so he can get through the interview before falling apart on the job, but really hard to find the good ones. It just doesn't have much mindshare at the moment (ug…
I'm interested. I love Perl, and would love to work for a company that requires me to program in Perl. Care to share which companies are these? Thanks.
If you want to work with Perl, http://jobs.perl.org/ is always a good place to look.
Re: Why I Use Perl: Reliability
#69Earlier quoted context omitted.
You can write readable Perl, just like you can write secure PHP. The fact that a large number of people don't is not necessarily a failing of the language.
Disagree. Readability and reasonable shoot-self-in-foot protection are not optional. See the article from earlier today about not catering to power users. Same concept. You can't really design a language for the top 5% of programmers and expect it to gain any sort of acceptance. (See: Haskell, Ocaml)
Are regexps readable? Is sed/awk readable? xpath?
Perl is a power tool. The reason it can be unreadable is because of it's terse syntax, wherein resides its power. If you value readability above power then you choose Java, and I would agree that for a large enterprise app developed by an army of mediocre developers then Java is surely the better choice. However to judge the absolute merits of a language like Perl on reputed readability, without taking into consideration what its terseness allows, and how it works for large scale development given a sane coding standard is just burying your head in the sand.
Re: Why I Use Perl: Reliability
#707-10 years ago, Perl was my daily bread and butter. It was the language I used the most, and not only did it supplant a lot of C code, but was the optimal scripting solution. Now, for me, Ruby has supplanted Perl in nearly every conceivable way -- OO Perl was always painful, and I do not miss ever having to bless a refrent again…
I do Perl on a daily basis, and I can't remember when I last blessed a ref.
use Moose;