[sf-perl] Perl search engine

Paul Makepeace Paul.Makepeace at realprogrammers.com
Wed Jul 21 20:14:13 PDT 2010


On Wed, Jul 21, 2010 at 16:12, Joe Brenner <doom at kzsu.stanford.edu> wrote:
>
> Paul Makepeace <Paul.Makepeace at realprogrammers.com> wrote:
>> Not to get into a language war but there are some really excellent
>> reasons not to use perl for large organizations like that. Python, all
>> things considered, is a pretty good choice, IMO.
>
> Well, not an obviously dumb one, at any rate.
>
> Coding standards, with perltidy and perlcritic in the tool chain can do
> a lot to cover the problem with coordinating armies of programmers.
>
> If you're referring to, say, the lack of standardization in general
> in the perl universe, you probably have a point (it's great to be able
> to pull all sorts of things off of CPAN, it's not so great that you
> can't know without looking how, say, objects were implemented, or how
> error handling was done, and so on...).

It comes down to complexity - perl is just waaay more complicated than
python. Assuming you have to spin up a developer on one scripting
language (and one because you want standardization of languages), you
want the one that'll take the least amount of time and still be able
to tackle a wide problem domain. For all the heat about syntax etc
perl & python _basically_ do the same thing. Python's ability to
interface with C blows perl out of the water too.

Where perl really shines, apart from CPAN, is the command line, but
it's reasonably straightforward to learn enough to do useful stuff
there.

Paul


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