Re: [Hampshire] Why I like Perl

On Wednesday 15 Oct 2008, Damian Brasher wrote:
> Unearthly hour,
>
> The learning curve so far has been relatively steep, but once through the
> Llama book and practicing with small scripts now after several months
> slowly picking my way through the syntax I can read it and make
> subroutines work and play with functions, manipulate context and regex's.
> Coding is much smoother than in Bash and for the approx. 600 lines I have
> just written Bash would have become too cumbersome. I really like the
> warnings and use of strict pragma, the feedback has been understandable
> and very decipherable for debugging. I also like the syntax, it's easy on
> the eye, curly, and lends itself to readability and fits in well with my C
> knowledge. Larry Wall is a clever chap! Llama is a must read though, now
> one of my favorite tech books of all time, Schwart, Pheonix & foy actually
> managed to make me laugh a few times just at the right time:) not sure who
> the funny one of the three is.

I'm pleased to see another Perl user in the world!

> It's great so far - still new to me but have just finishing tapping out my
> first reasonable sized app. Yep, shhhhh, you guessed it
> diap-alpha-dev-v0.1 in Perl at long last...bit br0ken in places but
> written.

I like Perl for a number of reasons:

1) I know it better than Bash, Python or Ruby, knowing something gives it a
start over similar languages.

2) Small/dynamic languages like Perl are a really good fit for the kind of
problems I face. c/c++/Java is over the top for most of what I do and
Bash/awk/sed is often too simple. Perl is fits in the sweet-spot.

3) CPAN is without doubt one of the most powerful things that Perl has,
thousands of reusable components all ready to use for pretty much any
problem.

4) The Perl community is great, very lively and friendly.

5) I like the language, it's flexible, is good a doing what you mean, it's
easy to write clear maintainable code.

There are problems but they are controllable and often over-reported:

1) It's possible to write bad code, though that's possible in any language.

2) Some people in the past have been a bit snotty, though it's less of a
problem more recently.

3) There are elements of the Perl core that are less than ideal, though it is
getting better and when Perl6 comes out lots of things will get fixed.


I wouldn't make a Python use Perl just because I say so, but I would say that
if you want to learn a dynamic language then Perl is a good one to look at.

--
Adam Trickett
Overton, HANTS, UK

I guess that, if you're in Microsoft's shoes, it makes sense. If you
can't write software or protocols that can stably walk and chew gum,
program in a limit that prevents the user from telling it to do so.
-- Jonathan Patschke, on limitations in Active Directory