-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 Troy.A Johnson wrote: >>>> On 10/3/2008 at 8:31 AM, in message <48E61EC2.8030202 at tcbug.org>, Josh Paetzel > <josh at tcbug.org> wrote: >> My advice to people is, if you've gone through the work of learning >> perl, all of it's operators, all of it's special cases and exceptions >> (and there's a lot of those) all of it's commonly used paradigms, then >> there's no compelling reason to change. If you are wanting to learn >> something today, python and ruby are attractive choices. > > What about them make them more attractive choices than Perl? > > Because Python and Ruby have fewer operators, special cases, > exceptions, and common paradigms? > I'll attempt to answer that in two parts. Why I no longer use perl, and why perl seems to have fallen in popularity. Before I start let me preface these comments with a bit of background. I am a professional programmer, languages don't mean a lot to me. I really don't have a favorite language any more than I had a favorite tool in my carpentry days. Lately I've been working in an all python shop, could just as easily had been ruby or C++ though. I no longer personally use perl after a string of bad experiences that culminated in me rewriting a backup program I'd written myself in perl that was suffering from some bugs that I couldn't figure out. In fact, in looking at the code a year later I was having trouble following what it was doing. I still know perl, at least as well as python, but I no longer use it, just like I rarely use awk anymore these days. My personal complaints is that it's far too hard to debug and maintain perl to justify using it anymore. I think perl has fallen in popularity across the board because of several reasons. 1) There are other viable alternatives out there. Yes perl has a lot of modules on CPAN, more so than python or ruby has available. But that's only relevent if you are trying to do something for which there is no python or ruby module, and there is a perl module...and in 2008 that's a fairly small edge case. 2) For a lot of applications speed simply doesn't matter. People use RoR all the time for deploying webapps and that's ungodly slow and hardware intensive. Why aren't they using the faster more efficient perl? Why has perl gone from the only game in town to virtually unused for dynamic web content? Most web developers will cite maintainability, speed of development, and debugging concerns I wouldn't suggest to someone who is proficient in perl to stop using it (even though I have myself). But for someone who is looking to learn a programming language today, there are better choices available that weren't around or viable 20 years ago. That being said, there are cases where perl is the right tool for the job, I'm not trying to say that it's evil and should be stricken from the earth. It's flexibility is it's power, and if you are willing to learn it inside out it can be a very powerful tool. I do think there are very valid reasons why the world has sort of moved on. - -- Thanks, Josh Paetzel PGP: 8A48 EF36 5E9F 4EDA 5ABC 11B4 26F9 01F1 27AF AECB -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.4.7 (MingW32) iD8DBQFI5ljEJvkB8SevrssRArEjAJ9/0PwF7JAsNBPllorgspkvRHGN5QCgimrl gLyT+UzFrv4IjVEDzroCdII= =Zpkh -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----