[Kc] Question

Jay Hannah jay at jays.net
Sun Jul 16 20:55:15 PDT 2006


[Original thread starts here http://mail.pm.org/pipermail/kc/2006-July/000501.html]

Stephen Clouse wrote:
>> Others will tell you that Perl is a write-only language. I.e., what one
>> programmer writes, no one else will be able to decipher. And extended
>> form of this is the complaint by some that Perl isn't appropriate for
>> large projects involving many developers. This is a fall out of TIMTOWTDI.
> 
> Such accusations are vile and odious lies of the bourgeoisie.  Be not
> swayed by the Party line.
> 
> I have personally managed a project involving 6 developers and 750,000
> lines of Perl code.  A quality OO design and instillment of best
> practices with Perl will get you as far as (or even farther than) any
> bondage-and-discipline language.  Mind you, there are some things to
> like about B&D in C++, but RAD in Perl is fine also.

What's RAD? (Rapid Application Development?)

750,000 lines? Wow. We "only" have 42,000 lines. As far as I know that makes us the biggest Perl shop in Omaha. ~3 programmers are mucking with the code at any one time. We seem to have the same level of cooperative coder angst in Perl, VB.NET, and Informix 4GL, so I haven't seen Perl as substantively different from any other language for scalability. Good documentation is always key. 

I keep thinking autodiscovery in Visual Studio (and Eclipse?) should be a huge time saver, but I always seem to struggle w/ the .NET framework anyway not knowing what the methods I just autodiscovered actually do. Seems just as easy to use the Perl debugger and perldoc.

I also keep thinking I need to tackle some huge stuff in Java/.NET/Python/Ruby just for personal learning, but I never seem to get around to it. Don't know that I want to set myself up to compete w/ Indian and Chinese programmer markets anyway. :)

j



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