Re: Perl Pros and Cons: Syntax and Modules (Was: Larry Wall Talks, Perl and Lua)

Hi Velu,


I don't like braces myself, Ruby and Lua
using words is, to me, much preferrable with speech. e.g:
Well, I prefer braces for enclosing blocks of code, and I don't like to use regular expressions just for jumping to a certain part of the code. 


companies don't like when they need to use a language that's
used by very few programmers

But Perl does have advantages, such as easy integration with Unix tools.
It was designed to replace shell scripting and I think it has somewhat
succeeded in that in a cross-platform manner. I think Perl is best at
niches such as shell scripting, biology,
Well, it could be helpful for a system admin, but in my country most system admins don't learn it very well. Most of them are that kind of system admins that just install software with yum and use only default configurations. There are good system admins also, but an important part of them prefer to emigrate to UK, Canada or Germany or other countries where the salaries are bigger. 


text processing etc... Not as a
general purpose language like Java,
In my country this kind of languages are most important because they can be easily used for outsourcing, for creating software for foreign companies. Those companies don't need programs in perl, nor system administration. 


I think Perl is even gaining some ground in Windows via ActiveState and
Microsoft. FOr the first time in their scripting compo, Microsoft had a
separate category for Perl scripts.
This is because perl is great as a language, but not because there are many enough programmers in perl. 
But it is something good.


Nice, and looking at the project page it is being updated quite rapidly.
HOwever, how did you learn it, i.e. where can I get proper Perl specific
docs? I also find it strange that it is not part of the ActiveState PPM
repositories yet. I'm planning to give it a spin when it reaches 1.0.
I've learned it by asking very many questions on the WxPerl mailing list, and from the wxWidgets chm manual. The problem is that manual is for programming in C, not for perl, and sometimes is harder to translate into perl. Oh, and one more thing. On most of its pages it is written that "this is not available in perl" but it is not true for most of the features. But the guys that improve WxPerl don't have the time to also update the manual. 
WxPerl is much often updated than Win32::GUI indeed.
It has classes for very many things... you can find them on search.cpan.org by searching for Wx. 

Octavian

__________
View the list's information and change your settings at http://www.freelists.org/list/programmingblind

Other related posts: