<br><br><div class="gmail_quote">On Fri, Mar 26, 2010 at 1:19 PM, Brian Wall <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:kc0iog@gmail.com" target="_blank">kc0iog@gmail.com</a>></span> wrote:<br><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); padding-left: 1ex;">
<div>On Fri, Mar 26, 2010 at 12:43 PM, Steve Cayford <<a href="mailto:strayf@freeshell.org" target="_blank">strayf@freeshell.org</a>> wrote:<br>
> I would second the perl vote. One-liners, system administration, web<br>
> applications, it runs the gamut and scales well. Just follow best practices<br>
> to keep code clean and manageable.<br>
<br>
</div>I'll third perl. The synax (mostly) makes sense, and you have the<br>
option to precompile or not. I wrote a really weird app for work in<br>
Perl (my first REAL coding project) and I really like coding in it.<br>
Much more than PHP, which isn't bastardized perl so much as just a bad<br>
idea.<br>
<br>
<br>
Python was all the rage for awhile, and has some really nice<br>
characteristics. After writing an app in perl I really didn't feel<br>
like changing course and re-writing the whole thing in python because<br>
someone told me it was better. Again, YMMV. I really don't know<br>
why/if python is awesome.<br>
<br></blockquote><div><br>It's not any less of a rage. A few years ago at OSCON I saw a<br>graph of O'Reilly book sales. Back when OSCON first started <br>(OSCON used to be the Perl Conference) it was all about Perl.<br>
But in recent years book sales have surged for Python and Ruby <br>and I believe that likely correlates closely to the mindshare <br>each language has (though of course you can't see how many <br>people purchased books in all three). <br>
<br>Support for object oriented programming was bolted onto perl <br>after the language had been around for awhile. Python was <br>designed from step-1 with object orientation in mind. That's <br>why it's implementation is cleaner. Someone remarked it's <br>
important to know best practices in Perl to write good, <br>maintanable code. Perl let's you do things many ways, but <br>it's not always obvious what the best way is. And if you've<br>ever found yourself in the middle of a "list context/scalor-context" <br>
dilemna in the middle of a complicated expresion... yeah. <br>That's a special kind of hell unique to Perl. So part of Python's<br>appeal is that a lot of those issues unique to perl's implementation<br>don't get in the way of you expressing your thoughts. <br>
<br>In short, often where Perl is kind of mesy - especially with respect<br>to object oriented programming, Python is nice and clean. You <br>just have to accept indentation (white space) matters. <br><br>I also think Perl 6 was the worst thing to happen to Perl. Perl 6<br>
was supposed to "fix perl" and make it better. At the same time<br>they decided to write a generic scripted-language-runtime-system <br>(Parrot) that would generically support Perl 6, Perl 5, Python, Ruby, <br>
whatever - you name it. Parrot languished and never manifested, <br>Larry Wall published Apocalypse after Apocalypse, and it kept <br>never really showing up. In fact, the best way to see Perl 6<br>in action was to include implementations of Perl 6 in Perl 5. So people had <br>
this feeling Perl 6 was never going to show up, and after while the <br>Perl maintainers realized the best thing to do is just keep on <br>incrementally improving and supporting Perl 5, which they do very <br>well now. Meanwhile, they work on Perl 6, but I'm not sure why. <br>
<br>I spoke to one of the perl release managers recently and he <br>declared "What people never understood about Perl 6 was<br> that it was a research project. It was never supposed to be<br>'the next perl'." That strikes me as revisionist history - I think <br>
Perl 6 WAS supposed to be the next big thing. Maybe Perl <br>5.64.00 will be Perl 6. Anyway, while Perl 5 languished and <br>then caught it's stride again in the shadow of Perl 6, Python<br>and Ruby really took off. <br>
<br>Anyway, I don't mean to imply Perl is not useful - it's exceptionally <br>useful. And powerful. I'm just explaining why I think many <br>people (including myself) find Python very appealing and <br>a refreshing change of pace. <br>
<br>Cheers,<br>
<br>-Rob<br><br></div></div>