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Re: Samples of big projects done in Perl

by GrandFather (Saint)
on Aug 06, 2006 at 23:18 UTC ( [id://565879]=note: print w/replies, xml ) Need Help??


in reply to Samples of big projects done in Perl

Actually the thread you reference has a fair discussion of using Perl for BIG projects. At the end of the day you can use Perl for BIG projects involving a very large number of lines of code, but it most likely is not the most productive language for that sort of use.

There is no single tool that does every job. That is just as true for languages as it is for DIY equipment. Sure, you can drive screws in with a hammer, but that's not the best way to do it. The closer the fit you get between the job at hand and the tool to do the job the easier the job is to do. Sad as it may seem, Perl is not always the best tool and one area where it is not the best tool is in writing very large applications.

Actually, discussing what constitutes BIG may be fairly important. To me a big project is 50,000 lines and up, involves more than one person and writing likely spans more than a year. YMMV.


DWIM is Perl's answer to Gödel

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Re^2: Samples of big projects done in Perl
by Happy-the-monk (Canon) on Aug 07, 2006 at 12:37 UTC

    ++ for a good article. From my (admittedly very narrow) experience in the field I must disagree with your general opinion, though.

    Right you are that Perl isn't always the right tool for every job, but in my own worklife experience I've seen many projects of the scope you mention, and miraculously, the ones done in Perl went quite remarkably well many more times than those done in other languages (Java, C++, Python, C, PHP, VB, Ruby in descending order of their use.)
    Just to say, there might be places where Perl might be the right tool for larger projects.

    What would you suggest would be the computer languages and technologies that are more likely suited for bigger projects?

    Cheers, Sören

      Ovid mentions a 1/4 million line Perl project he worked on which certinally shows that Perl can be used for BIG projects in the right hands.

      My argument is more to do with "stricter" languages picking up egregious mistakes earlier when they cost less (by whatever measure) to find and fix. As projects get larger the cost of finding and fixing such mistakes gets higher, almost exponentially.

      To put this all slightly in perspective: in many ways I'm a sloppy programmer who depends too much on my programming tools to find silly errors for me. For large projects such errors have a better chance of being detected early with C++ than with Perl.

      I don't have enough experience with a wide range of languages to say which might be "The Best". But from my experience, at one extreame, cost per line of assembly language is much higher (and does much less) than anything else I've used and it doesn't scale well at all. C++ and Perl are definately toward the other end of the scale. I've not written code for a BIG project in Perl and I suspect that for me and my style of programming, Perl wouldn't scale at all well. I am involved in a BIG C++ project and know that, despite my sloppy coding, the project is progressing in a saticfactory fashion with about 6 people working on different parts of it and that it is maintainable.


      DWIM is Perl's answer to Gödel

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