SPUG: Does Perl Scale? (Was: Evolution of Perl)

[Ken McGlothlen]

Brian Aker <brian at tangent.org> writes:

| Ken McGlothlen wrote:
| > | Much as I like Perl, weakly-typed, free-form languages like Perl are not
| > | as appropriate for large projects as C++ and Java are.  Since Perl
| > | doesn't have any way of enforcing compliance with subroutine interfaces
| > | for OO calls, it can be difficult to track down bugs in large systems.
| > | It's easy to say that programmers shouldn't create bugs, but using a
| > | strongly-typed language can produce a better product.

For the record, I didn't write that; I *quoted* it.  I was arguing against that
point of view.

| I really miss arithmetic ifs. Its the one thing that languages just never
| picked up on after Fortran.

Uh . . . well, the cmp and <=> operators in Perl do that, in a certain sense,
and you can simulate it either with

        if( $a == 0 ) {
            do_zero_case;
        } elsif( $a < 0 ) {
            do_neg_case;
        } else {
            do_pos_case;
        }

or

        do_case( $a, $a <=> 0 )

or

        $b = ($a == 0 ? do_zero_case
                      : ($a < 0 ? do_neg_case
                                : do_pos_case));

I don't really miss arithmetic-if any more than I do gotos.

| That is funny, since I wrote an entire Borne shell replacement in assembly
| because I hated VMS so much.

(* giggle *)  Yeah, I can see that.  All depends on what you were raised with,
I guess.  Before VMS, I was forced to use HP MPE III---so VMS made me very
happy on first encounter.  :)

| How close is gtk to being exactly this?

I don't know.  I should look into that more.

| I would disagree. Java is modern day COBOL. Very easy language that you can
| take bad programmers and throw them at it.

I suppose.  I actually kind of liked Java when it first came out, because it
had so many strengths compared to C++.  Unfortunately, Sun refused to take
responsibility for porting it, but wouldn't relinquish control, so I eventually
lost interest in it as a viable language.


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