language war

> Well, I have used Perl for a couple of thousand-lines-projects and while
> I can't say it's wonderful, it's usable as far as one is strict (i.e.
> code for strict and warnings), and use implicit things as less as
> possible. If you abstract things the right way it's not the nightmare

Actually, Perl is wonderful for several classes of programs. I wrote a
web-based application in Perl that probably would have been many times as
long in any other language. On top of that, I got a full SOAP API with
just a 100-line wrapper script.

Perl has really powerful OO features, and makes it really easy to do
things that you only wish you could do in other languages. It is
especially useful when you need to come up with special-purpose templating
languages.

It's RegExp language is also excellent. While you can get PCRE in other
languages, Perl having it built-in to the language makes them much easier
to use.

Jon

> you think it is. Agreed, the language grants you the power to do it
> "the wrong way" (write-only language), but I distrust anything that
> takes that power away (may I say Java?).
>
> PHP on the other hand, while I don't quite like it, is not also the
> nightmare you make of it. You are of course not forced to embed HTML in
> the logic -- in these days, doing so is folly. Most [sane] people uses
> templates. Same with Perl.
>
> Python may be better, but keep in mind that it _also_ grants you the
> power to do thing the wrong way. In fact, a colleague of mine is right
> now ranting about a specific project, saying that he will have to write
> it almost completely from scratch to be able to extract certains parts
> of the functionality -- the author apparently did not abstract them
> correctly. I have yet to use Python much, but the little I have seen I
> like.
>
> --
> Alvaro Herrera (<alvherre[a]dcc.uchile.cl>)
> Al principio era UNIX, y UNIX habl y dijo: "Hello world\n".
> No dijo "Hello New Jersey\n", ni "Hello USA\n".
>
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