Re: What hurts you the most in Perl?
[BTW, I'm wondering if this thread should be moved to advocacy] Nicholas Clark n...@ccl4.org writes: On Sun, Nov 28, 2010 at 08:03:54PM -0800, Jarrod Overson wrote: Once a full rewrite is on the table it's hard for a team and/or company to not at least question whether or not perl is the right language to use going forward. For almost every project i've worked on in the past several years, it hasn't. Good perl programmers are hard to find and keep and the bad ones write the code that eventually has to get rewritten. And that isn't true for any other language? Yes. A company not a million miles from me (but more than 1000) has just written a disaster, in Java. And I'm curious in a couple of years how the majority of recently written Rails apps turn out. (Particularly Rails, because it's rapidly become very trendy, which means that demand for programmers will have outstripped experience with it) Very true. Nevertheless most people/companies will want to have functionality that works, and they want it now. If someone steps up and says I'll do it, in time, at a competetive pricing noone will question the language and tools used to write it. Proof? VB, PHP, Ruby, and so on. Other people/companies have followed the strategy of going with future-proof new developments. So they migrated from Assembler to COBOL, from COBOL to C, 4Gen, Java, you mention it. Did they get better software? I have my doubts. Perl is not the best language for everything. Maybe not even the best language for anything. It's just fun to write... -- Johan
Re: What hurts you the most in Perl?
On Wed, 24 Nov 2010 10:54:31 -0500, Sébastien Aperghis-Tramoni sebast...@aperghis.net wrote: So I wonder what hurts *you* the most in Perl? In terms of Perl itself, apart from the reference syntax, the thing that really annoyed me recently was the lack of advanced debug tools, for example to find memory leaks. None of the tools I found or was pointed to worked in my case. I have to second this. Trying to track down a memory leak recently in a fairly large and complex multi-fork()ing application left me with a bunch of modules that basically stated use this on the data structure or piece of code you already know to be leaking, and you'll get a lot of technical diagnostic information, but there seemed to be nothing I could just attach to the application in any way that would help me *find* the data structure or piece of code that was leaking. Coming up with unit tests that were complicated enough to stably reproduce the condition essentially boiled down to rewriting the entire application from scratch in a TAP-oriented way. -- Paul (PWBENNETT)
Re: What hurts you the most in Perl?
-BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE- Hash: SHA1 out of curiosity, did you try Devel::Leak::Object ? http://search.cpan.org/~adamk/Devel-Leak-Object-1.01/lib/Devel/Leak/Object.pm When I was tracking down a leak somewhere in foswiki, i added some functionality to AdamK's module (which he's now released) and it found them for me pretty quickly. I had no idea where the problem would be, and did suffer from a few false positives, but it did solve the issue. Sven On 29/11/10 23:59, Paul Bennett wrote: On Wed, 24 Nov 2010 10:54:31 -0500, Sébastien Aperghis-Tramoni sebast...@aperghis.net wrote: So I wonder what hurts *you* the most in Perl? In terms of Perl itself, apart from the reference syntax, the thing that really annoyed me recently was the lack of advanced debug tools, for example to find memory leaks. None of the tools I found or was pointed to worked in my case. I have to second this. Trying to track down a memory leak recently in a fairly large and complex multi-fork()ing application left me with a bunch of modules that basically stated use this on the data structure or piece of code you already know to be leaking, and you'll get a lot of technical diagnostic information, but there seemed to be nothing I could just attach to the application in any way that would help me *find* the data structure or piece of code that was leaking. Coming up with unit tests that were complicated enough to stably reproduce the condition essentially boiled down to rewriting the entire application from scratch in a TAP-oriented way. -- Paul (PWBENNETT) -BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE- Version: GnuPG v1.4.10 (GNU/Linux) Comment: Using GnuPG with Mozilla - http://enigmail.mozdev.org/ iEYEARECAAYFAkz0QIsACgkQPAwzu0QrW+moBgCgh7iXVaacpFo/Ze8Nl5ziiUv5 +xwAnjxxuK+kztEoWNo+AqXGtx49a7UO =y1vv -END PGP SIGNATURE-
Re: What hurts you the most in Perl?
What hurts me is that Perl has fallen out of favor so much ... I'm contemplating jumping ship myself, and moving to Ruby or Python, not because of anything intrinsic to the language but just because Perl is going the way of Cobol or Fortran. On Wed, Nov 24, 2010 at 4:01 AM, Gabor Szabo szab...@gmail.com wrote: The other day I was at a client that uses Perl in part of their system and we talked a bit about the language and how we try to promote it at various events. Their Perl person then told me he would not use Perl now for a large application because: 1) Threads do not work well - they are better in Python and in Java. 2) Using signals and signal handlers regularly crashes perl. 3) He also mentioned that he thinks the OO system of Perl is a hack - that the objects are hash refs and there is no privacy. So I wonder what hurts *you* the most in Perl? Gabor -- Gabor Szabo http://szabgab.com/ Perl Ecosystem Group http://perl-ecosystem.org/ -- Check out my LEGO blog at http://www.brickpile.com/ View my photos at http://flickr.com/photos/billward/ Follow me at http://twitter.com/williamward
