Re: [gentoo-user] New project in perl? {OT}
On Sunday 02 January 2011 01:17:09 kashani wrote: Unless the language you're familiar with is completely unsuitable, I'd say familiarity trumps language features. I've been out of coding for too long to know much about modern languages (so ignore me if you like), but I think this is exactly right. Another language may have all the juicy, whiz-bang features you want for your shiny new project, but if the team doesn't know it you can't use it straight away, and you'll incur a substantial extra development cost. -- Rgds Peter. Linux Counter 5290, 1994-04-23.
Re: [gentoo-user] New project in perl? {OT}
Apparently, though unproven, at 03:32 on Sunday 02 January 2011, Stroller did opine thusly: On 1/1/2011, at 10:34pm, Grant wrote: ... I'm starting a new project that is quite straightforward and will interface with an old project. The only point of contact between the two projects might be both of them having access to the same database table. The old project is written in a language that is related to perl so I can imagine there would be some benefit to using perl for the new project. Am I foolish to start a new project in perl at this stage in its lifecycle? I won't be doing the coding myself and I wonder if I would be better off with PHP since more coders seem to be familiar with PHP than perl. I'm not sure if I've mentioned before, but I picked up Perl fairly recently (within the last 12.5 months) although I haven't done *that* much with it. I *really* like Perl. It feels extremely robust and right. My 2c. I had a similar reason for picking up Perl. Here's what I now think of it: Any language has good coders and bad coders using it, there's nothing the language can do about that and it can't defend you from yourself either. There is much bad Perl code out there but that's because there are so many coders using it. The clincher is: If you are the kind of coder who is pedantic about writing stuff correctly, Perl goes out of it's way to help you do that. It will also help you to write utter complete shit code too, but that's a human issue, not a language one. -- alan dot mckinnon at gmail dot com
Re: [gentoo-user] New project in perl? {OT}
I'm sorry this is OT but I really value the opinion of many people subscribed to this list. I'm starting a new project that is quite straightforward and will interface with an old project. The only point of contact between the two projects might be both of them having access to the same database table. The old project is written in a language that is related to perl so I can imagine there would be some benefit to using perl for the new project. Am I foolish to start a new project in perl at this stage in its lifecycle? I won't be doing the coding myself and I wonder if I would be better off with PHP since more coders seem to be familiar with PHP than perl. In '99 I worked with a fellow who styled himself a software architect. The first step of each project he managed involved stating We will write this software in Java. As you can imagine that's sorta backwards. I'd spec the software function, features, etc and then decide which language has better tools or command of the problem space. You will have to balance that against your knowledge of the language and the developer skills you have access to. However even the exercise of deciding Python appears to be the superior language in this problem space, but we're going to go with Perl because the database module for our db already exists and is much more mature. Bob knows Perl better too. is worth doing because it helps define the scope of the project. FWIW the current startup I'm at is using Ruby for the front end and it's been a bit more work that PHP which is what the last company used. That's partly Rails immaturity, our lack of experience with Ruby, and having to learn the Rails/Ruby way. Unless the language you're familiar with is completely unsuitable, I'd say familiarity trumps language features. YMMV. kashani Thanks to everyone. I really love this list (and this distro). I'll stick with perl. - Grant
[gentoo-user] New project in perl? {OT}
I'm sorry this is OT but I really value the opinion of many people subscribed to this list. I'm starting a new project that is quite straightforward and will interface with an old project. The only point of contact between the two projects might be both of them having access to the same database table. The old project is written in a language that is related to perl so I can imagine there would be some benefit to using perl for the new project. Am I foolish to start a new project in perl at this stage in its lifecycle? I won't be doing the coding myself and I wonder if I would be better off with PHP since more coders seem to be familiar with PHP than perl. - Grant
Re: [gentoo-user] New project in perl? {OT}
-BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE- Hash: SHA1 On 02/01/2011, at 09:04, Grant wrote: I'm sorry this is OT but I really value the opinion of many people subscribed to this list. I'm starting a new project that is quite straightforward and will interface with an old project. The only point of contact between the two projects might be both of them having access to the same database table. The old project is written in a language that is related to perl so I can imagine there would be some benefit to using perl for the new project. Am I foolish to start a new project in perl at this stage in its lifecycle? I won't be doing the coding myself and I wonder if I would be better off with PHP since more coders seem to be familiar with PHP than perl. TBH use neither, most people are jumping away from PHP and Perl. There is no issue with a change to your language now. SQL is a standard so using python, or ruby to interact with it will have no issues. Just make sure that you copy the database to a dev box first so that you avoid mangling your important data. - Grant William Brown pgp.mit.edu -BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE- Version: GnuPG/MacGPG2 v2.0.16 (Darwin) iQIcBAEBAgAGBQJNH8QuAAoJEHF16AnLoz6Jj3kP/Rb+2kRj3CYzfp9sO3EgTnfw b7SHcz/wJaHPyK+fHftWJRAfpa7+8ymNmSLuQj/9/lBnn5/7OOw0GhGLC1zHJ96u nQLdToRXreSDd4ci6k9uVdlNP9qjrSSjBG3jAP5ZWnDwq7vNhAPD4M67i03uLCYC B1hJv+ZtFk98U6HivkJv9wO6GoE/QRNVtX1BS6y6ZvjiRF3qx5PPDRxAmqfgbDzk E04xBUOsXH1+yJKewZdoM3bIHUNxYpDK9IaSjDQVPJK8/TFn7ImNRP0aDbuUIpuH b95Ujq3ugbmE4ZD8hysD6oIgc8iGnEpmGuBCWuA3a/1VVx+e1p+qyPSriDVeFh15 gWKuxS6lAlqwlpXKrqnKMTfKzHivPTkw2/muMKAB09nC8lVEUvrj+K2es3rFfUI8 ZbiBIAVSJThgFLJfbWOQoh6AB6qqP5BMCAYtVTuuzKDVtc6ww5lipX4dejRooDl/ P9uAF1Yv8q9X3DNIF3LjVpPxEjzqUMFCKIUXQ1BDCUhST7YNPAyjxbbf5gTEcDN8 7XVBcCaT/fjtF/gxq2KKP/jlJLwgzuMxsmxON9snK8rUgODfGz1yutZOH70u7Gmg irC4V8uE1lNZVJgl/MQ2qXIBwcEtH+/+5eRvMHxSwtigNUqZcr0Re1h8Csk/rSuX XFGWRO4tas3sH+ReOB0e =QxHa -END PGP SIGNATURE-
Re: [gentoo-user] New project in perl? {OT}
On 1/1/2011 2:34 PM, Grant wrote: I'm sorry this is OT but I really value the opinion of many people subscribed to this list. I'm starting a new project that is quite straightforward and will interface with an old project. The only point of contact between the two projects might be both of them having access to the same database table. The old project is written in a language that is related to perl so I can imagine there would be some benefit to using perl for the new project. Am I foolish to start a new project in perl at this stage in its lifecycle? I won't be doing the coding myself and I wonder if I would be better off with PHP since more coders seem to be familiar with PHP than perl. In '99 I worked with a fellow who styled himself a software architect. The first step of each project he managed involved stating We will write this software in Java. As you can imagine that's sorta backwards. I'd spec the software function, features, etc and then decide which language has better tools or command of the problem space. You will have to balance that against your knowledge of the language and the developer skills you have access to. However even the exercise of deciding Python appears to be the superior language in this problem space, but we're going to go with Perl because the database module for our db already exists and is much more mature. Bob knows Perl better too. is worth doing because it helps define the scope of the project. FWIW the current startup I'm at is using Ruby for the front end and it's been a bit more work that PHP which is what the last company used. That's partly Rails immaturity, our lack of experience with Ruby, and having to learn the Rails/Ruby way. Unless the language you're familiar with is completely unsuitable, I'd say familiarity trumps language features. YMMV. kashani
Re: [gentoo-user] New project in perl? {OT}
On 1/1/2011, at 10:34pm, Grant wrote: ... I'm starting a new project that is quite straightforward and will interface with an old project. The only point of contact between the two projects might be both of them having access to the same database table. The old project is written in a language that is related to perl so I can imagine there would be some benefit to using perl for the new project. Am I foolish to start a new project in perl at this stage in its lifecycle? I won't be doing the coding myself and I wonder if I would be better off with PHP since more coders seem to be familiar with PHP than perl. I'm not sure if I've mentioned before, but I picked up Perl fairly recently (within the last 12.5 months) although I haven't done *that* much with it. I *really* like Perl. It feels extremely robust and right. I originally picked up Perl in order to parse the output of another program and build an HTML table based on that data. The other program happened to be written in Perl, too, but I figured that Perl was a good choice because it was supposed to be good at parsing (and parsing was the job I was trying to do). I started out parsing this output, and it turned out that the program I was depending on didn't give enough information externally this way. So I had to modify the original program, and add the feature I needed - I was able to do so really fairly quickly, and soon had my first submission (a patch of maybe 200 lines) accepted into an open-source project. Well, I guess vgetty distributes a shell script of mine in its contrib directory, but this felt much more of a grown-up achievement. Doing this in Perl felt really accessible to me, being able to complete this task within hours [1] of picking up the language. The stage of Perl's lifecycle is not anything to be worried about. Perl may not be a cool language, but it isn't going away. Perl 5.x.y will be maintained for a long time; Perl 6 is in development. On the other hand, you can easily find Perl developers who have been using the language in industry for a decade. You can write bad code in any language - Perl has a reputation for opacity but, y'know, Greek sounds pretty opaque to me, that doesn't mean it's a bad language. To be honest, I think the problem is that Perl can be really terse, and that's why newcomers to a codebase have problems understanding it, but I'm inclined to think of Perl's terseness as a *good* thing. From the code I've read on the net, the advice I've received from Perl programmers, I tend to feel the average code quality of Perl developers is higher than that of the average coder in some more fashionable languages, such as PHP or Python. I would think that if you were to contact your local PM group you would find someone who writes pretty good code and who will provide references. http://www.pm.org/groups/ Perl has a big library of modules for interfacing with databases. Your guy should use as many of those as he needs to, and not reimplement things from scratch. Beware of people who write their own libraries or who prefer to do it for themselves - there are some extremely sophisticated and well-maintained modules in CPAN. Stroller. [1] Not the same day, but within only a few hours of actual using the language, for large values of a few.
