[oclug] Why Perl is a Bad Language

[Michael P. Soulier]

On Sun, Feb 25, 2001 at 07:34:50PM -0500, Shad Young wrote:
> I dunno, I have never had a whole heck of a lot of interest in Perl. The
> criticisms of it are valid, its a nightmare distribution with so many
> redundant modules it get confusing and frustrating fast. Its also
> painfully slow. I have been dabbling with Python of late and frankly I
> love it. Seems to be growing at a much faster rate than Perl too. 
> 
> Why anybody would prototype in C is beyond me. In that sense Perl is
> easier to get a prototype app out the door, though the more I use and
> work with Python the more it becomes apparent that its even better at
> that than Perl.

    Like I said, I don't think that Perl and Python have to compete, but
people keep bringing it up. 

    Currently Perl is better for system administration tasks than Python,
although as Francis argues, Bourne shell, sed and awk are often appropriate in
its place, especially when portability is an issue, since it's very likely
that sh, sed, awk and grep are going to be on the target if it's Unix. 

    I think Python is better in the application space as a replacement for C,
unless resources are very tight and you need to micro-manage. Mind you, the
faster we make these computers the more we use them for, so the Java camp
saying that performance is no big deal because the boxes get faster is
ludicrous IMHO. 

    Perl sets the standard for regular expressions, to the point where Tcl
incorporated their library to keep up, and the Python developers are doing the
same. I find that it also makes far better glue than Python, which is
something that I do a lot. However, having written 10000 line apps in Perl,
I'd rather have done it in a language with stronger typing. 

    Like I said, use the right tool for the job. 

    Mike

-- 
Michael P. Soulier <msoulier at storm.ca>
"With sufficient thrust, pigs fly just fine. However, this is not necessarily a good idea. It is hard to be sure where they are going to land, and it could be  dangerous sitting under them as they fly overhead." -- RFC 1925