Re: Perl and London Broil: The future of computing magic?

in reply to Perl and London Broil: The future of computing magic?

Well, I think CPAN is what most developers are jealous of when they don't get to work in Perl. The problem here seems to be one of distribution packaging.

While Python's cheeseshop is definitely no CPAN, the distutils tools provide a good starting foundation for creating a standard way for packaging and distributing Python modules and applications.

Perhaps there's a Perl equivalent (or maybe there should be if there isn't one).

PHP is really behind on pretty much everything. It's a nice toy, but is no real comparison to Perl or much of anything else.

print$_%15?$_%3?$_%5?$_:'Buzz':'Fizz':'Fizzbuzz' for 1..100;

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Re^2: Perl and London Broil: The future of computing magic? by sundialsvc4 (Abbot) on Feb 05, 2009 at 15:57 UTC
The biggest issue that very-quickly appears, when I'm using “quick and simple” tools like PHP or Ruby, is that when you bump up against their intrinsic limitations ... a great big hole is ripped into the side of your ship and you sink straight to the bottom of the harbor. The PHP executable, for instance, “is what it is.” Whatever you compiled into it, or more likely, what the hosting-company compiled into it. It's got “everything you'll ever need,” but when the moment inevitably comes when it doesn't... (and that moment will come...) ... you're scroo’d. So, I think that what has been keeping Perl going for so long, in so many different applications, is precisely the fact that it isn't “quick and simple.” It's “general purpose.” And what makes it that way is CPAN. (Uhh, and Moose.) This is what gives it life-span. The implementation decisions made with these “other” language were, of course, made quite deliberately and purposefully. But given that “the web” is changing so rapidly, I think that just a few years down the road there will be a really nice CPAN module to recompile PHP into Perl. `:-)` (Oh, hell. What am I saying? This is Perl. It's already out there someplace, isn't it?)

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Re^2: Perl and London Broil: The future of computing magic?
by sundialsvc4 (Abbot) on Feb 05, 2009 at 15:57 UTC

The biggest issue that very-quickly appears, when I'm using “quick and simple” tools like PHP or Ruby, is that when you bump up against their intrinsic limitations ... a great big hole is ripped into the side of your ship and you sink straight to the bottom of the harbor.

The PHP executable, for instance, “is what it is.” Whatever you compiled into it, or more likely, what the hosting-company compiled into it. It's got “everything you'll ever need,” but when the moment inevitably comes when it doesn't... (and that moment will come...) ... you're scroo’d.

So, I think that what has been keeping Perl going for so long, in so many different applications, is precisely the fact that it isn't “quick and simple.” It's “general purpose.” And what makes it that way is CPAN. (Uhh, and Moose.) This is what gives it life-span.

The implementation decisions made with these “other” language were, of course, made quite deliberately and purposefully. But given that “the web” is changing so rapidly, I think that just a few years down the road there will be a really nice CPAN module to recompile PHP into Perl. :-)

(Oh, hell. What am I saying? This is Perl. It's already out there someplace, isn't it?)

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