[Phoenix-pm] Perl Best Practices

[Metz, Bobby W, WCS]

I'm just curious how Scott really feels about it and want to say "Hey,
what's wrong with Pascal?" ;-)

	Joking aside, I choose to be an optimist like Brock.  If I
don't, then I'm one of those that will have to admit I've wasted the
last few years of my life learning Perl instead of Java or C#.  I
remember having Java pushed on is in school when it was relatively new.
You're right, it has it place just not for me.  Didn't like it then,
don't like it now...not due to complexity, but rather execution
speed...oh, and I guess the API complexity has a bit to do with it.  
	As to companies choosing one or the other, I know my company is
deeply in bed with Perl and some PHP.  Our real development group uses
Java and Ruby but the groups that really get practical things done are
the ones using Perl and PHP, not to mention we charge a heck of a lot
less to the business units wanting something.  I also throw out that
primary Perl jobs are somewhat alive and well based on the daily adds I
see on the jobs at perl.org list.  Of course, I don't belong to anything
similar for the other languages so who knows.

Bobby

-----Original Message-----
From: phoenix-pm-bounces at pm.org [mailto:phoenix-pm-bounces at pm.org]On
Behalf Of Brock
Sent: Thursday, July 14, 2005 9:49 AM
To: Scott Walters
Cc: Phoenix.pm Mailing List
Subject: Re: [Phoenix-pm] Perl Best Practices


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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