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in reply to Perl for big projects

Do you mean "big projects" or "production code". To me "production code" makes my workplace productive - I have a pile of Perl script sitting there doing that job: Perl is hugely productive.

On the other hand I would be unlikly to use Perl for a really large application - Perl provides far too much rope and no tensioners to manage the slack. The bottom line is that there is no one language that is best for everything. Perl is damn fine for a lot of stuff and can be written to be maintanable for sure. I've even had to maintain some of my own code so I know it's possible. :)

DWIM is Perl's answer to Gödel

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Re^2: Perl for big projects
by graff (Chancellor) on Jul 11, 2006 at 05:41 UTC
    ... I would be unlikly to use Perl for a really large application ...

    Actually, it is getting to the point now that rather few applications written in Perl need to be "really large", in terms of what the application developer needs to write from scratch.

    I've created a number apps that are actually fairly small in terms of what I personally have written, but they do "really large" things that I couldn't dream of being able to do without the core and CPAN modules. I'm sure that if I joined all the modules for an app into a single set of source code, it would be a pretty large amount of code.

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      Indeed. And that thought crossed my mind as I was writing my reply. However much the same is true of most other languages, and certinally is true of the popular languages. It is still the case however that if you need to write large amounts of code there is a win by using languages that cut down your freedom of expression through strict type checking and other such constrains as a price for better management of large projects.

      Unless you have been involved with a really large project that is large because it has to be (not because it is poorly written or poorly designed), it is hard to imagine the sorts of problems that arise and even harder to know how to manage them.

      DWIM is Perl's answer to Gödel
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Re^2: Perl for big projects
by CountZero (Bishop) on Jul 10, 2006 at 21:56 UTC
    Do you mean "big projects" or "production code".
    I wouldn't know and most probably Tom Horsley wouldn't know either. As you say, writing maintainable code isn't more difficult to do in Perl than in any other language. The few C-programs I've written are after so many years well nigh impossible for me to understand what I tried to achieve then.

    CountZero

    "If you have four groups working on a compiler, you'll get a 4-pass compiler." - Conway's Law

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Re^2: Perl for big projects
by spiritway (Vicar) on Jul 14, 2006 at 05:15 UTC
    I've even had to maintain some of my own code...

    If your employers are that mean, you should probably report them ;-)

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