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Perl - the Detroit of scripting languages

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Re: Perl - the Detroit of scripting languages

#2

Post by guylhem »

In perl5 :

- I can have a prototype running in a matter of minutes

- I have access to a vast library of modules doing everything I need (which helps the former)

- I write quick and efficient code

Do I really care about what other people think about the languages and tools I use? No.

However, I do care about efficiency and results

And, uh, working with a language that has been out for tens of years makes me believe my time investment is safer than with the fad-du-jour JS framework/library/whatever.

BTW, Maybe buying a home in Detroit (especially now that it's officially bankrupt and will hopefully be able to break out of the unions commitments) would be a good business move? That's a cheap place to bootstrap a business for sure.

Re: Perl - the Detroit of scripting languages

#3

Post by j546 »

guylhem wrote: post #2

In perl5 : - I can have a prototype running in a matter of minutes - I have access to a vast library of modules doing everything I need (which helps the former) - I write quick and efficient code Do I really care about what other people think about the languages and tools I use? No. However, I do care about efficiency and results And, uh, working with a language that has been out for tens of years makes me believe my…

I can have a prototype running in a matter of minutes

That's the case for any microframework whose language you're comfortable in.

BTW, Maybe buying a home in Detroit (especially now that it's officially bankrupt and will hopefully be able to break out of the unions commitments) would be a good business move? That's a cheap place to bootstrap a business for sure.

Not really because part of having a business is staying alive :)

Re: Perl - the Detroit of scripting languages

#5

Post by TylerE »

guylhem wrote: post #2

In perl5 : - I can have a prototype running in a matter of minutes - I have access to a vast library of modules doing everything I need (which helps the former) - I write quick and efficient code Do I really care about what other people think about the languages and tools I use? No. However, I do care about efficiency and results And, uh, working with a language that has been out for tens of years makes me believe my…

I challenge your efficiency claims.

The benchmarks just do not support. I mean, roughly in parity with Python and PHP, 20x slower than Clojure on average, 30x slower than Haskell, and on many tasks 100x slower than C. Over the whole bredth of the Alioth shootout programs, Perl trades places with JRuby as the slowest tested language.

Re: Perl - the Detroit of scripting languages

#7

Post by mahmud »

simias wrote: post #4

Dozens of slides of memes, curses and buzzwords. The state of communicating on the internet in 2013. Can someone more patient than I am tell me if there's some actual content in there?

tl;dr:  

The talk might have been different, but there is nothing of substance in the slides.

Re: Perl - the Detroit of scripting languages

#8

Post by petepete »

williadc wrote: post #6

tl;dr - the author wants someone to re-write Perl 5 and CPAN to add some features he likes and remove some features he doesn't like.

In fairness, the author is also Stevan Little, the chap who brought us Moose and Moe

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moose_(Perl) https://github.com/MoeOrganization/moe

Re: Perl - the Detroit of scripting languages

#10

Post by guylhem »

TylerE wrote: post #5
guylhem wrote: post #2

In perl5 : - I can have a prototype running in a matter of minutes - I have access to a vast library of modules doing everything I need (which helps the former) - I write quick and efficient code Do I really care about what other people think about the languages and tools I use? No. However, I do care about efficiency and results And, uh, working with a language that has been out for tens of years makes me believe my…

I challenge your efficiency claims. The benchmarks just do not support. I mean, roughly in parity with Python and PHP, 20x slower than Clojure on average, 30x slower than Haskell, and on many tasks 100x slower than C. Over the whole bredth of the Alioth shootout programs, Perl trades places with JRuby as the slowest tested language.

Most of what I do involves loading text files with fixed width records. A file is between 500M and 4Gb. Then I do things with these records.

So far I have not found anything faster than perl unpack (1), but I would be happy to. I plan to investigate Go soon.

Would you have another suggestion?

1 : or marginally faster, with the advantages negated by the time it takes to write the code. However, a 10x improvement would be very interesting to me.

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