[oclug] Why Perl is a Bad Language

[rgiffin at cangurus.com]

Addressing issues in this one point only:

XML is not necessarily "new" unless 5 years old is new these days.  Replace "new" with "recently popular" and it makes more sense.

Many languages handle XML easily out of the box.  The "PERL doesn't handle XML properly out of the box" arguement is primarily because without the proper extensions it cannot handle unicode, which is by definition part of the XML standard.  Without the XML::Parser module PERL doesn't handle unicode, but unless you know your system is going to have to handle unicode, nobody would know the difference anyway.  PERL is almost a natural out of the box, except for this one issue, and you don't really need more than a few pages of code either.  Java also handles XML out of the box so to speak, so does C++.  (And Python, PL/SQL, VB - sorry, it does, and a few others I know which might seem a little obscure to y'all.)

I wouldn't want to handle XML with a language that didn't have at least rudimentary support for building queries, or in which I was forced to write only procedural code - some of the things you can do with XML might make that a little difficult - but otherwise a lot of languages have support for it out of the box. (wow, don't read that out loud without taking a breath!)

Rod.

On Thu, 22 February 2001, Colin Bell wrote:

> 2) The "Perl doesn't handle XML well" argument.
> 
>      XML, although people tend to think otherwise, is still pretty new.
>      Show me a language that, out of the box, provides a simple interface
>      to XML and I will happily withdraw this comment.  The modules on
>      CPAN  do make it easy to handle XML but don't use Perl to program
>      your whole XML based data management system.  If you do expect to
>      invest in a great deal of moleskin for those blisters.  Maybe you are
>      prototyping and you want to use XML so that it is easy to test
>      different test cases but DON'T BUILD A 10000 line package with it
>      PLEASE!