From: Stuart Watt > On Windows, for the most part, Perl is the easy bit. Getting it to talk to some parts of Windows is a bit harder. Getting it to run to a > production standard with Microsoft technology is almost unbelievably complex. It would probably be much easier with Cygwin, Apache, etc., > but then, the whole point of them is to hide Windows, so that isn't really a help.
Getting Perl to talk to some parts of Windows and get information from different parts of Windows is very hard and it requires knowing very well the low level details of Windows, which is a big disadvantage of Perl. Unfortunately I don't think that this situation will change. If we talk about "Perl" as that low level functional language that have more than 200 internal functions, and don't care about CPAN modules, we can't say that it can always create portable programs, because not all those functions work well under Windows. If we consider Perl with all the CPAN modules, then we also can't say that it is very portable, because there are very many CPAN modules that can't be installed at all under Windows, and some other CPAN modules could be installed but they are just not made very well so they can't be compiled very easy. Perl isn't good for Symbian either and it is not as good as Java for other devices, but I think that even the lack of portability is a very big issue, it is not the biggest. I think the biggest issue is the fact that Perl with its CPAN modules are very hard to install, because even if perl is installed, many CPAN modules can be installed only if the user has root access and shell access, which in 99% of the times, it is not the case. Somebody asked me yesterday if I can create a web site for his small company, a little web shop which for the beginning should be very simple, no credit card payments required, and now I think that the costs involved for creating that site would be much bigger if I would use Perl and Catalyst than if I would use PHP. There are very many sites that offer PHP and MySQL access for a few dollars per month, and for some more they can offer more other features, but for using a host that offer shell access, I would need to have at least a virtual server where I could have root permissions in order to be able to install everything I need, including Catalyst and all other Perl modules, but this would cost much more, so that guy might want to choose something cheaper for the beginning. Of course that if his business will succeed, he might want to add new features to his site, and he might need to have even a dedicated server, but in that moment I doubt that he will decide to go for a Perl solution and abandon PHP. If Perl would offer a solution of deploying the Catalyst apps without needing to install anything with a root or shell access, using PAR or something else, Perl would have a much bigger success. Octavian
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