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Why I Use Perl: Reliability

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Re: Why I Use Perl: Reliability

#131

Post by kamaal »

jshen wrote: post #128
adrianhoward wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was about to note that the OP clearly hasn't used Clojure if he uses it as a negative example in terms of reliability, but then I remembered — I promised myself not to get too deeply into these kinds of silly discussions. Erm... He didn't? He said: "While so much of the shiny-chasing buzz in the micro-ISV startup built-it-and-they-will-fund world seems to chase Clojure and Node.js and app-in-a-page tricks, Perl 5 c…

"Lots of folk using it because it's the new-and-shiny rather than it being necessarily the best solution" How do you know what is in people's head? I assert that lots of folk are using perl because it's comfortable to them rather than it being the best solution.

The difference between computer science and software engineering is Software engineering is real work for the real world. Often the constraints are money, time, resources.

So demands of a software project in the real world are very different than the academia. Although you can argue that Lisp is far more a better language than Perl, based on some parameters you wish to evaluate. Others might have totally different parameters, for example in terms of mere usability and pace of getting things done, Perl will fare better than Lisp.

While evaluating two technologies it is really important to define the parameters you wish to evaluate them upon. Without that we are just comparing Apples and Oranges and then arguing that nutrition on one isn't better than the other. Unless we define who needs an Apple and who needs an Orange for what reasons, we won't be able to say which is better than what for what purposes.

There fore comfort is really a subjective term. For a professor sitting in a university with endless time at his disposal Lisp will make the perfect and most comfortable language. But me sitting on P1 ticket assigned to me, and given 45 minutes to provide with solution has no other option but to use Perl. In other news I just have a weekend to hack up a automation or produce a quick prototype. You know what language I'm going to use, Its Perl.

Not because I hate Lisp or I'm uncomfortable. Its just there is no other option.

Re: Why I Use Perl: Reliability

#132

Post by kamaal »

michaelpinto wrote: post #125

Yes Perl is a great language -- stability, maturity, etc. But does anybody realize just how hard it is to find decent Perl programmers? It's not a large community to begin with and the pool of decent programmers is even smaller.

I find the opposite to be true. You are likely to find better Perl programmers than Java programmers. Because its easy to spot bad programmers in Perl.

Most Java programmers can't write simple apps without the help of an IDE. Or refactor a small part of a large project with an Text editor. In many other languages forcing people to write programers in a particular style often leads to code written by bad and good programmer look the very same.

Re: Why I Use Perl: Reliability

#133

Post by kamaal »

TylerE wrote: post #21
pwaring wrote: post #19

Earlier 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)

In that case you are likely to never like any form of string/data/text processing. Unless it is provided you through an interface of a database, XML or JSON. And there are plenty of tools designed to handle data from such interfaces.

You will be shocked how few tools are there for the other kind of data.

Re: Why I Use Perl: Reliability

#134

Post by milano »

adrianhoward wrote: post #111
zentrus wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Check this site out for a comparison of the various module counts per language. It is really incredible that rubygems surpassed CPAN last year and continues to grow at a very rapid rate. Quality may be another matter, but still, impressive. http://www.modulecounts.com/

Nice site. Well found. I find it interesting that PHP doesn't have anything in the same league as Perl/Ruby/Python even after all these years. Any PHP folk out there?

Composer (with http://packagist.org/) is getting popular in the PHP world.

Re: Why I Use Perl: Reliability

#135

Post by pjscott »

JonnieCache wrote: post #108
adrianhoward wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Short answer - no. CPAN has had many more years than Ruby's Gems to mature and develop. There are 2560 [edit: I was wrong. 39411 is the right number] gems on http://rubygems.org/ . There are 24,920 distributions on CPAN. Well over 100k modules. The automated testing infrastructure, documentation, etc. also makes it much easier to figure out what modules work on what systems and what versions of perl than in ruby land…

wrt testing, ruby is getting there with http://travis-ci.org Also the rspec ecosystem is becoming more and more mix-and-match. It's nowhere near as integrated as perl yet though.

Travis-CI also works for a bunch of other languages, so if you're a library maintainer, it's definitely worth checking out:

http://about.travis-ci.org/docs/user/getting-started/

Re: Why I Use Perl: Reliability

#136

Post by wiredd »

jleader wrote: post #63
ralphgoodtimes wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

ZipRecruiter is also hiring perl programmers in Los Angeles (email in profile if anyone's interested).

Re: Why I Use Perl: Reliability

#137

Post by jonathansizz »

zentrus wrote: post #104
ryeguy wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does ruby not have the same level of both?

Check this site out for a comparison of the various module counts per language. It is really incredible that rubygems surpassed CPAN last year and continues to grow at a very rapid rate. Quality may be another matter, but still, impressive. http://www.modulecounts.com/

Except that there's over 107,000 Perl modules on CPAN, and fewer than 40,000 Ruby gems.

Re: Why I Use Perl: Reliability

#138

Post by fffggg »

jwr wrote: post #45

I was about to note that the OP clearly hasn't used Clojure if he uses it as a negative example in terms of reliability, but then I remembered — I promised myself not to get too deeply into these kinds of silly discussions. So, dear OP, good luck writing your large-scale multithreaded high-performance distributed applications using Perl. And BTW, I do use Perl quite a bit and I really like it, for certain tasks. But…

Others have noted that your reply is a non-sequitur. However, I'd like to address it anyway, specifically the "luck" part.

I have written all of what you describe: large-scale multithreaded high-performance distributed applications using Perl.

When necessary I have written perlXS bindings to C routines, but this is surprisingly infrequent. Most high performance system interfaces are exposed to Perl in an efficient manner. I've had Perl processes with tens of gigs memory resident. I have written non-blocking state machines in Perl which serviced (or served) over 100k connections in parallel. Which have run on over 100k machines at once. I have worked on huge modular, multi-team undertakings in Perl. The single caveat is that separate processes and explicitly shared memory is the parallelism tool of choice with Perl.

Luck wasn't a part of any of this. Perl will scale quite well, and if you think it doesn't you likely have a few things to learn about what the language/platform can do.

Re: Why I Use Perl: Reliability

#139

Post by peteretep »

waffle_ss wrote: post #65
fennecfoxen wrote: post #28

Earlier 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…

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 th…

I'm a Perl weenie through and through, and I ask myself this every time I start a new project, because I know one reason I turn to Perl each time is because I am /fluent/. Hiring Perl developers is hard, Perl has some ugly bits, and it's far from 'cool', however:

DBIx::Class, Moose, Catalyst, Template Toolkit - these are a joy to work with. People seem to be just ok that they have Rails, bitch about Active Record, and honestly, just don't seem to love their tools.

TAP-based testing is awesome sauce. Ruby gets this so wrong with all tools checking return values of scripts + the occasional hacked together jUnit outputter. Even the testing tools stolen from Ruby (like Test::BDD::Cucumber (which I may have written)) use TAP and Perl's testing tools all the way down.

Finally: there's CPAN. It Just Works. I started off a Perl dev, and use of any other language's package system has just made me sad face.

Re: Why I Use Perl: Reliability

#140

Post by peteretep »

ralphgoodtimes wrote: post #43
fennecfoxen wrote: post #28

Earlier 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 Europe, the following companies always seem to be growing their (already large) Perl teams:

http://www.net-a-porter.com/ http://www.lovefilm.com/ http://www.photobox.co.uk/ http://www.booking.com/

Send me a CV and I can make sure it gets to the right people.

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