Hi there,
On Fri, 14 Jan 2000, Barb and Tim wrote:
> honest evaluations of the downsides of Perl
Thanks for the note, and welcome. I'm not sure the mod_perl list is
quite the place for this as a topic, so you other list readers might
want to hit `D' now. The list is primarily for discussions about the
application of the Perl extensions to the Apache web sever. You seem
to be having trouble with Perl itself, which you really need to get
under your belt before you address the quite separate topic of Perl
embedded in Apache. The mod_perl list is kind of a mish-mash of
sub-topics leading on from there.
> It could really enhance your integrity
Hmmm. I don't know about integrity, but I have to say that I really
wish I had taken the time to learn about Perl many years before I
actually did. I do a lot of text processing in my work and AFAIK
there is nothing that gets even close to Perl for concise expression
and fast development of what I do. I use Perl by itself and Perl in
Apache as well. One of my sites has over 25,000 products that can be
ordered on line and I honestly don't know how I'd cope with it on my
own without Perl.
> The promotion of Perl on this site is so ubiquitous and one sided
That may be true (not if you've read _all_ my posts:) but then it's
hardly surprising either. People who don't like it or can't hack it
usually just walk away. I came close myself, for different reasons.
> Perl has such a bad reputation in many ways,
I don't know what you mean. Bad reputation for what? If people are
trying to use it for something it's not good at, then I can understand
why they'd be unhappy with the results. If I need to do something
that's better in C or assembler, then that's what I use. I've used
Fortran since 1971, Assemblers since 1975, C since 1977, Pascal, Ada,
RTL/2 (always my favourite), several shells, an assortment of DBase
type things and a whole bunch of others not really worth mentioning.
Although I've used Perl only for the last two years or so, for a quick
hack I still tend to go for Perl first. The way you can mix and match
bits of Perl and Unix is hard to beat. Er, you're not using Windows,
are you?
> The language itself is hard enough to swallow.
Well, I agree that the _syntax_ may be a little odd. But the language
itself really isn't very difficult to grasp. Coming after 25 years of
C I found the trickiest bits were remembering the differences between
C and Perl (sometimes remembering which language I was using at the
time!) and coping with the fact that you've really only got three data
types. For me one great thing about the language is the very powerful
pattern matching and substitution, and the interpreter itself is by a
very long way the best of any I've used. The warnings you get with
`perl -w' and `use strict' far exceed any reasonable expectations and
continue to amaze me with the mistakes they pick up.
> full honesty
I think you're getting honesty from the people on the list. Don't
forget that some may be relatively inexperienced (and perhaps a little
in awe of some of the high powered talent that lurks around here) but
for the most part they like what they're doing and only occasionally
tear all their hair out. Which you will see mentioned on the list...
> somebody like me has a hard time swallowing the sunny
> prognostications and finally diving in
Well, don't swallow, just put a toe in the water. Nobody's forcing
you. What kinds of things are you thinking of doing with Perl?
73,
Ged.
