>Date: Thu, 25 Jul 2013 20:25:38 -0400>From: David Larochelle
><[email protected]>>To: john saylor <[email protected]>>Cc: Boston Perl
>Mongers <[email protected]>>Subject: Re: [Boston.pm] Perl community "The Rising
>Costs of Aging Perlers">Message-ID:
><cae4b3qhpznbm-4aozecvdxpfkafpruaxffx9yxu1ytindek...@mail.gmail.com>>Content-Type:
> text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1>>No response?>>I hope you guys didn't think I
>was trolling. I was really hoping that>someone on this list could point to a
>problem space (e.g. bioinformatics)>or an application domain where they could
>make a compelling case for>starting a new project in Perl.>>I would be
>concerned about the future of the language if no one can make>this case.
All the code related to my doctoral dissertation has been in Perl. I would say
based on my experience (caution! n=1 !) Perl is very well suited for academic
Comp. Sci. Hardly the specific application domain you were asking about but
if anyone is starting a substantial academic project in order to prototype an
algorithm or some new technique I would certainly recommend Perl.In my specific
case I have developed some new data visualization techniques which I have
prototyped in Perl somewhat leveraging PDL.The idea that a high level scripting
language is good for algorithm development is hardly new though.Perl just has
many worthy competitors at this point. Sadly, I think that given two equal
choices, say Perl vs Python,people may make a choice based more on fashion than
anything else. Even if many more academic projects were to be done in Perl I
highly doubt that would increase Perl's attractiveness to many people.
Having the "next Twitter" or other such cool thing written in Perl would be the
best thing to benefit the language.In the startup world I get the sense that
Perl certainly has some small footprint but it is dwarfed by Ruby and Python
and several others.
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