This seems to have been turned into a thread about the relative (compared to other languages) usefulness of Perl in the workplace. >From my experience in Zoran and what I heard from friends in other "Semiconductor" companies (Intel, Marvel), Perl is very much alive and used in our industry, thank you very much :) There are rarely if ever any competitors for writing tools/scripts, except for Tcl*.
It's just that not being software companies, these places rarely if ever look for Perl programmers, as such. Instead they look, when they need people to support the Perl tools, for people with knowledge in the related VLSI/hardware field *and* knowledge of Perl, or they teach him/her Perl from scratch. I feel this is a shame as usually the Perl code written tends to be of "beginner" quality - not always bad, just not high quality, certainly not easy to extend to large projects/teams. In addition there is little expenditure of resources on Perl itself (IDEs, books, updated versions), so Perl remains a 'side project' of a few dedicated individuals... Note that all of the above is my highly subjective and personal experience or stuff I've heard - people from other companies may have totally different experience or knowledge. One area where I feel Perl is lacking compared to Java or C++ is writing GUIs. Perl GUIs are usually (almost always) written in Perl/Tk, especially as Tk comes installed with ActivePerl. Frankly Perl/Tk is butt-ugly (at least in a Motif based desktop such as the one we use - YMMV), lacks modern features and widgets and is therefore not appealing for most GUI tasks except for very simple ones. Perl bindings to other toolkits (GTK+, QT, WxWidgets) are difficult for beginners to master, badly documented, lack examples and are practically impossible to install in the workplace since you need the relevant header files and those are not always installed... A self contained Perl module with no outside library dependencies and advanced GUI features and look is probably a pipe-dream, considering the amount of work that goes into such a toolkit such as Swing, GTK+ or QT. But this is what Java and C++ have and where I feel Perl is lacking. With a really good GUI widget toolkit, I think Perl would be much more interesting for companies and individuals used to today's GUI-intensive environment. * Tcl was pushed as the default interface language of the two largest EDA companies, Synopsys and Cadence. The users - hardware companies - are slowly but surely following, as really they have little choice. Just my 2cents worth, -- Offer Kaye _______________________________________________ Perl mailing list [email protected] http://perl.org.il/mailman/listinfo/perl
