From: "Brandon McCaig" <bamcc...@gmail.com>
On Thu, Jan 6, 2011 at 1:33 AM, Octavian Rasnita <orasn...@gmail.com>
wrote:
the Perl community is not so interested in Windows OS, although it is the
most used OS and the OS used by the most businesses.
That's sort of flame bait. :\ I'll try not to preach. :P It /might/ be
true that more businesses use Windows operating systems than
alternatives operating systems, that isn't a very relevant metric to
consider anyway. To me, Perl seems like an exceptional tool for system
tools, Web programming, quick hacks and things of that nature. In
those areas, I think that it's fair to say that unices are generally
much more popular (I'd say superior, but that's my opinion). I
wouldn't want to be stuck with a Windows OS for any of those things,
but I'll withhold my reasoning.
Unixes are far superior for *hosting* web applications indeed, but they are
not as good as Windows for using them as desktop apps, and a programmer is a
desktop user also so it is important if Perl doesn't have the same tools for
this OS like other languages.
I did say that I consider Perl the best for web programming already, but if
it is not the best language for Windows this doesn't mean that we shouldn't
say this.
However, if a language is better than another but is used less and less
and
it has a bad image, and the language which is not so good is used more
and
more and has a better image and attracts more new programmers, on the
long
term that language will be improved faster and it will become much
better.
I've never heard of Perl having a bad overall image. Quite the
contrary. C is still a vastly popular language, but there are
countless people and groups that will label it dead and obsolete. They
wouldn't be talking about it if it didn't matter. :P Everybody is
entitled to their opinion and everybody experiences life a little bit
differently. I think that Perl is still a vastly popular language and
I don't foresee that changing anytime soon. Like all software, it
always comes down to "right tool for the job", and Perl is the right
tool for a lot of jobs.
Of course and I have already told for things for which Perl is the best. But
I also think that Perl is the best for *a lot of jobs*, and not for
absolutely everything.
There are reasons why more and more programmers prefer now Python and
even
Ruby and those programmers probably don't prefer Perl because they see
some
disadvantages in it, don't you think so?
More than likely, they prefer Python and/or Ruby either out of
personal preference (we don't all think alike) or experience and for
many because they haven't actually used Perl. The impression that I've
gotten is that Perl is an intimidating language to many (it's similar
to C in that respect).
If Perl is intimidating I think that this is a disadvantage.
People often form strong opinions about things
that they know nothing about, especially when they're influenced by
fear or other similar emotions. They're entitled to believe what they
believe. Even if nobody else was using Perl I'd still want to keep it
in my toolbox.
If the majority uses Windows it doesn't mean that Windows is the best OS and
if the majority uses PHP it doesn't mean that PHP is the best programming
language.
But it does mean that they do have some advantages that other operating
systems or programming languages don't have.
Why should we fear to also admit those points in which other languages are
better than Perl?
We already use C in Perl modules, admiting that C is faster and we also use
TCL-based libs for creating GUIS in Perl because Perl is not very good for
generating graphics/sound/video.
And this is not a problem at all if we admit this by just using that
software. Is it bad if we also speak about it?
In any case, once you've learned one programming language it's
generally much easier to learn others, so one shouldn't worry too much
about which one to learn and just learn one. There is no one
programming language that is best at everything. The OP's seeking
answers that simply don't exist without well defined parameters.
Well, my opinion is that this is not exactly true. Learning core Perl is not
very hard. It is pretty easy. But it is more hard to learn high level
libraries like DBIx::Class, Moose, POE and others, and these things are
different for other languages (if they have similar libs).
Octavian
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