Re: (dws)Re: Re: Is Perl the End-All?

[clemburg]

Thanks dws, I am glad to hear that.

The biggest Perl based system I have worked with till now is a commercial content management system called "Imperia" that has a little bit more than 175.000 lines of Perl code (with comments) in the last version I worked with.

I agree with you that "theory of operation of the product" is the biggest impediment in learning to work with such a system, and Perl is not a trivial language in itself, too.

Still, I find it very annoying that in Perl, your only option to be sure how a function is called is to wade through the actual big lump of code. And you can't auto-extract this information easily, either.

Christian Lemburg
Brainbench MVP for Perl
http://www.brainbench.com

[tilly]

And how many lines of code do you think that system would have been in another language?

I absolutely agree that Perl does not offer a lot of support for developing large software systems maintainably. But a lot of that is due to the decision to make a small amount of Perl do what would take considerably more in another language.

"Keep it small" is a valid approach to maintainability for many kinds of problems. It is one which many languages lose sight of. But it certainly isn't a magic bullet, and I wouldn't be surprised that a 170,000 line project in Perl could get painful.