[Phoenix-pm] Perl Best Practices

Brock awwaiid at thelackthereof.org
Thu Jul 14 09:48:45 PDT 2005


On 2005.07.14.00.34, Scott Walters wrote:
| But that's all part of a larger problem you only hinted at.  To answer your
| real question:  Perl is doomed.
| ...
| Perl's reputation killed it.  Perl 6 might be fantastic, and it'll have good 
| company with language such as OCaml, Haskell, Lisp, and Scheme -- powerful 
| languages that are never spec'd for in projects.  

"Perl is doomed" to what, exactly? It seems that Perl is not currently
being spec'd for the same tasks as java or C# or similar -- but was it
ever mandated by the boss for these uses? So doomed to live out its
current existence, perhaps.

For myself I've been noticing more and more activity in these powerful
yet to-the-side languages you've mentioned. It may be a Connectivity
Perception Issue (a CPI, as I like to call it) in which it is merely the
connectivity of communities which has increased and not the actual
interest in the technologies themselves... But from my vantage point
these things are all on the rise, especially late-bound "scripting"
languages such as Perl, Python, and Ruby.

When I'm in the bookstore and I notice another person looking at the
programming books I always ask them "What sort of programming do you
do". In the past I've mostly gotten "Java for work, but I'm interested
in Pyton" or "C++". But the other day I was in there and there was a guy
I posed the question to and he said "I'm thinking of picking up Ruby".
"Learning Ruby On Rails, then, eh?" "yeah."

At the same time, you're out there getting and filling contracts. You
are more in tune with what people want now compared to what people
wanted 5 years ago, whereas I do not. But I just left a job where they
built their whole system in Perl and now I'm in a spot where we will
change from PHP to Perl shortly, and Perl will be replacing an existing
jsp-based system.

One thing you mentioned is how people learn these easy scripting
languages first, then move on to other languages and blame all their
early nasty code on the original language. This makes a lot of sense,
really. But we're also getting waves of people who were taught Java as
their first language (thats what NAU teaches, ew) and are now like "God
that is some nasty Java code. But this OCaml/Haskell/Perl6 stuff is damn
clean!" So maybe even from that angle things balance out. Yin and Yang
and all that.

But I'm an optimist, so I may be biased towards Happyness :)
--Brock



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