Better Perl

[muppet]

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