Better Perl
muppet
scott at asofyet.org
Sat Apr 5 00:33:26 BST 2008
On Apr 4, 2008, at 7:01 AM, Jonathan Stowe wrote:
> On Fri, 2008-04-04 at 12:23 +0200, Zbigniew Lukasiak wrote:
>> RoR,
>> Django, PHP
>
> There you go again, these are purely web technologies. Why should we
> care if Perl (a general purpose programming language) is failing to
> get
> so much uptake in an area where there are more specialized tools? It's
> been like this for years, nay, ever. Remember Perl pre-dates the web
> and
> is probably deployed and used in more places that don't have
> anything to
> do with the web that whatever the trendy tool of choice for "web
> development" might be this week could never even get a foothold.
Like in-house version control, configuration management, and build
systems for non-web code, reporting and analysis for non-web data, and
munging around all the data that eventually goes into databases served
up by php and RoR front-ends? Oh, and desktop tools and throwaway
code you create to generate some C or even php code for some unrelated
purpose. Or running a cron job that needs filename manipulation more
sophisticated than a shell can give you. (I have had personal
experience with all of those, mind you...)
The popularity of a language has nothing to do with its usefulness,
except maybe for the risk involved in making a tool written in that
language part of some long-term process.
--
Diane, ten-oh-three, Great Northern Hotel.
Sheriff Truman and I have just been with the one-armed man, or what's
left of him.
In another time, another culture, he may have been a seer, or a shaman
priest, but in our world, he's a shoe salesman, and lives among the
shadows.
-- Special Agent Dale Cooper
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