Why I love/hate Perl

[mjwood0]

i love Perl because its opengl bindings is as fast as C , I hate it because after purchasing three books a couple of years ago from begginer ,Reference, Advance . I'm still having difficulty reading individual perls scripts. so when i found python, i just settled with it.

Might as well just use C for OpenGL then.

[scruff]

The beauty of Perl, without getting into which language is better (Perl verus Python versus Ruby, etc...), is that it is a standard package on default installs of all major OSes. As much as one might love Python and Ruby, in a standard enterprise environment, without gaining an exception, you will not find Ruby and/or Python installed by default, whereas you will find Perl. I love Linux and have tried a vast majority of the distros, but sadly Linux is still not the defacto standard operating system for major eCommerce applications for major companies. This is not to say you will not find some that are running it as their standard, but working for a Fortune 500 company I can say that we are still more of a Sun or IBM shop then we are RHEL or any other Linux distro.

I'm not sure I understand this statement. You will not find an OS that has Perl installed by default and not python. That is because the only OS's that include either are Linux and Unix-like OS's including OSX and all of those include both.

Windows includes neither by default...

[loell]

nah, perl opengl (POGL) , would still have an edge if the program will have objects , i would rather have to deal with hashes, scalars and objects , than a friggin pointer

[scruff]

nah, perl opengl (POGL) , would still have an edge if the program will have objects , i would rather have to deal with hashes, scalars and objects , than a friggin pointer

You deal with references, don't you? What's the difference, other than a slightly easier syntax?

Perl's OO is weak unfortunately. I love Perl (my first language), but it offers little in the way of encapsulation, inheritance, and other fundamental OO concepts. Objects are references to a hash in Perl, nothing more.

[KCPokes]

I'm not sure I understand this statement. You will not find an OS that has Perl installed by default and not python. That is because the only OS's that include either are Linux and Unix-like OS's including OSX and all of those include both.

Windows includes neither by default...

For example, Solaris does not have python installed by default yet it does have perl installed by default. Same for AIX. I am speaking from a production corporate UNIX eCommerce environment standpoint, not a personal install of common LInux distro. From a support standpoint you are forced to work with what is available as installing something like Python or Ruby would require an exception and jumping through a bunch of hurdles.

This does not apply for someone's personal use, of course, at which point I say go with whatever you are comfortable with. Typically, though, if you can code in one, say Perl, you can easily move to something like Python and at least accomplish basic tasks without struggling much.

[scruff]

For example, Solaris does not have python installed by default yet it does have perl installed by default. Same for AIX. I am speaking from a production corporate UNIX eCommerce environment standpoint, not a personal install of common LInux distro. From a support standpoint you are forced to work with what is available as installing something like Python or Ruby would require an exception and jumping through a bunch of hurdles.

This does not apply for someone's personal use, of course, at which point I say go with whatever you are comfortable with. Typically, though, if you can code in one, say Perl, you can easily move to something like Python and at least accomplish basic tasks without struggling much.

Is that right? I haven't used Solaris in at least 4 years (and never AIX) but I can't find any docs that indicate that Python is not a default on Solaris. I haven't searched on AIX yet...

I also come from a production environment and we wouldn't use anything such as Solaris or AIX. Many people don't. Red Hat (while I am not at all a fan) is still used in most server environments. People don't want to pay for commercial UNIX anymore. Why should you? When Linux (even when expensive such as RHLE) offer more up-to-date software, excellent support, and a wider range of packages? For development, we use RHLE 9 exclusively. For other tasks, Fedora is the workhorse.

While this is not a 100% educated opinion, I would still lay money on most servers out there running a Linux OS than something like Solaris. One fact that I do have is I can find tons of jobs related to Linux knowledge, but rarely (if ever) see ads for Solaris experience...

[KCPokes]

Is that right? I haven't used Solaris in at least 4 years (and never AIX) but I can't find any docs that indicate that Python is not a default on Solaris. I haven't searched on AIX yet...

I also come from a production environment and we wouldn't use anything such as Solaris or AIX. Many people don't. Red Hat (while I am not at all a fan) is still used in most server environments. People don't want to pay for commercial UNIX anymore. Why should you? When Linux (even when expensive such as RHLE) offer more up-to-date software, excellent support, and a wider range of packages? For development, we use RHLE 9 exclusively. For other tasks, Fedora is the workhorse.

While this is not a 100% educated opinion, I would still lay money on most servers out there running a Linux OS than something like Solaris. One fact that I do have is I can find tons of jobs related to Linux knowledge, but rarely (if ever) see ads for Solaris experience...

I have a Solaris server running downstairs right now and can tell you that python does not come by default. How that changes over time, no idea. I'm sure, eventually, it'll be included as well.

As far as paying for commerical UNIX, who does? I don't pay for Solaris. In fact Solaris is going the way of Open Source itself. You pay for SUN support, Sun hardware, but not necessarily the software.

You can always argue why one company chooses to go one route while the next doesn't. Why pay for Sun/iPlanet licenses when Apache is available and the support community is better? Why pay for WebLogic licenses when you could potentially use JBoss? Others make the decisions, which I may or may not agree with. When it comes down to which is in more demand, UNIX versus Linux, it is all going to depend on where you are located. Any more you see positions open looking for both experience as, when it comes down to it, if you have experience in one you can pick up the other pretty quickly. We are still more of a Sun shop, with IBM as a partner, and a growing number of RHEL blade servers.

While on the subject of the different flavors, one thing I do know is that Perl runs so much more efficient on Linux then it does Solaris. Funny part is that it is not a slight difference either; it runs noticably faster on a desktop running Fedora then it did on a dual-core Sun server.

[EDIT] I don't disagree that Linux is becoming more and more, if not the defacto standard, prevalent in data centers. It really comes down to the task at hand; some of these high end applications still require the architecture behind UNIX.

[scruff]

You can always argue why one company chooses to go one route while the next doesn't. Why pay for Sun/iPlanet licenses when Apache is available and the support community is better? Why pay for WebLogic licenses when you could potentially use JBoss? Others make the decisions, which I may or may not agree with. When it comes down to which is in more demand, UNIX versus Linux, it is all going to depend on where you are located. Any more you see positions open looking for both experience as, when it comes down to it, if you have experience in one you can pick up the other pretty quickly. We are still more of a Sun shop, with IBM as a partner, and a growing number of RHEL blade servers.

I see your point. I'm not sure about other locations, but Boston, NYC, and NJ see a lot more Linux action than UNIX.

While on the subject of the different flavors, one thing I do know is that Perl runs so much more efficient on Linux then it does Solaris. Funny part is that it is not a slight difference either; it runs noticably faster on a desktop running Fedora then it did on a dual-core Sun server.

Interesting. I spent very little time on Solaris, but it is curious that it would run less efficient on a powerful Sun machine than on a weaker Linux box...

[slavik]

Sun = Sparc = hardware not as easily available.

As for people paying for commercial UNIX? People buy Macs, don't they?

When you buy IBM, you buy the whole computing system/grid/whatever, just like a Mac, just how you bought computers in 1980s. You buy a system where the hardware and the software (OS) are sold together as a package.

Honestly, I wish that I could have a PowerPC or that new Sun chip under my desk. Except I don't make that kind of money (especially with grad school ahead of me).

Thing about reading other's Perl code is just like reading the startx script. Even though it's shell scripting, it is still difficult to read

as far as OO, yes OO sucks, there isn't even any OO in C but that didn't stop X and GTK.

In OO Python code, I see member functions with self as the first arguement. Make that firstgument mandatory (not optional) and you can do OO in ANY language.

As for encapsulation, structs do that fine.

Then there is data hiding and restricting data access (which is important for OO). In C, the "marketing idea" turned out (C was written before OO and when Smalltalk was around, it was slow) to be "Here's a box, here's the people that will put the right thing into your box if you ask them." It doesn't stop you from looking into the box and changing it before asking someone to put something else in. But once you break that seal, you better be careful or things will blow up in your face. Think of the package manager or program installer. In Ubuntu, you compile everything from source if you want, but if you want to upgrade a single package, expect to recompile for two days. In Windows, many said to hell with proper installations and we see the results of that (registry getting screwed up, installers managing dll files by themselves, etc.)

Many guides I see in the howto forum for installing new programs are pretty much "./configure && make && make install" which bypasses the package manager ... that's nice and cute, except when things break. That is why you learn to create packages.

you can "cat /proc/cpuinfo" or you can run a program that will make lots of neat sense out of what's in there.

OO is nice, but not having it is not the end of the world. But how many people can code in more than 1 paradigm? (answer: fewer and fewer)

[LaRoza]

OO is nice, but not having it is not the end of the world. But how many people can code in more than 1 paradigm? (answer: fewer and fewer)

I try to learn, I learned C, for Procedural, FORTRAN 77 for structured (it makes you use Fortran's rules in a wise manner, lots of goto's), Python, Java, PHP5 and C++ for OO, and LISP for functional.

I usually code in a prodedural manner, but use OO if it makes it easier.