[Wellington-pm] How much perl is out there?

[Daniel Pittman]

Steve Kieu <msh.computing at gmail.com> writes:

Ruby (and/or Rails, which might be enough to count as a different language,
depending on how you look at it).  PHP.  Was that even in question?

Go, Scala, and Groovy also look to be fairly high on the hype scale, though
none have really made that breakthrough.

> Ruby looks promising. I have been learning it for several days and feel that
> I has the power of most of others (perl, python, java, etc..)

Just don't fall for their "objects all the way" and "meta-programming"
bollocks; when you start to poke at it each interpreter is randomly different,
but they pretty much all make it impossible to do serious meta-programming
because the internals are randomly incoherent and contain strange bundles of
oddly thrown together code.

It isn't terrible, I grant you, but it surely is not as impressive as their
marketing makes out.  (Not, really, that any language is. :)

> The downside of it is that it does not get installed by default in my Lucid
> desktop :-(
>
> On Sun, May 30, 2010 at 11:46 AM, Dale DuRose <dale.durose at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> Whats the cool languages these days?
>> 
>> I've away just adapted to what the organization I'm working for is using. I
>> dont really have any favorite language. I hate every language for its bad
>> quirks. But i really hate python big time.
>> 
>> On 30/05/2010 1:30 p.m., Daniel Pittman wrote:
>> 
>>> Dale DuRose<dale.durose at gmail.com>  writes:  
>>> 
>>>> On 30/05/2010 10:44 a.m., Cliff Pratt wrote:    
>>>> 
>>>>> On 29/05/10 19:44, dale.durose wrote:      
>>>>> 
>>>>>> I have a question is perl still being used commonly in the new zealand
>>>>>> IT industry? I know in the past it was used for most web
>>>>>> applications. So i imagine its holding strong with the system
>>>>>> administrators out there?
>>>>>> 
>>>>>>        
>>>>> 
>>>>> I'd be surprised if it were "used for most web applications". Something
>>>>> like PHP would be more likely used for that.
>>>>> 
>>>>> We use it mostly for sysadmin stuff.      
>>>> 
>>>> About 10 years ago it was used for most web applications. Maybe even
>>>> longer than 10.    
>>> 
>>> Heh.  History.  You tell the kids today that Perl once had the reputation
>>> that PHP has, that it was used for all those awful throw-away one-shot CGI
>>> things that were the bane of security administrators lives, and they don't
>>> believe you.
>>> 
>>> Back then we had to hand-code our requests out of CGI.pm, too, and it was
>>> up-hill both ways.
>>> 
>>>         Daniel
>>> 
>>> Seriously: Perl was, once, the king of CGI.  These days?  Big in a whole
>>> bunch of places, mostly by virtue of graduating from a "cool" language to a
>>> serious one.
>>> 
>>> It joins FORTRAN, COBOL, C, C++, and other luminaries that are no longer
>>> the cool way to do exciting new things, but which get plenty of real work
>>> done.  
>> 
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