DB:It sounds to me like you have no use for any language that isn't strictly controlled, high-level, object-oriented, or otherwise more modern.
MG: You are reading in meaning I did not express, though I'm certainly in favor of a language that is modern in the sense of supporting the best technology available at the time.
DB: It sounds like the only complaint you can come up with is that by default you are allowed to use variables you haven't declared
MG: No, that was a "for instance". My premise is that Perl is not a good language for signifiant software engineering tasks,and that small tasks have a tendency to turn into big jobs.Just take a look at what the name perl means, "Practical Extraction and Report Language", that is what the creator larry had in mind. He designed it for quick and dirty jobs, not for software engineering. If that is what the creator of the language had in mind, mayby, just maybe that is a clue to it's virtues.
SB: (the memory argument holds no weight next to the bulkier and slower options that every is writing 'good' code in these days).
MG: Not sure of this reference, I mentioned memory in reference to PHP not Perl.
DB: If you have a problem with that, 'use strict'.
MG: My point was that by default Perl is set to the equivalent of "Use slack" this summarises the whole design of the language. Perl is widely used for web development, it makes it very easy to write insecure web systems. If you have ever seen a phantom user permenently connecting your machine to an IRC system at the other side of the world you will know how important security is.
DB: I could complain that java sucks because the multi-threading system only allows and asynchronous method to have the name 'run()', but I'm not going to because I feel I am able to write effective and well-designed code without feeling the ill-effects of this flaw.
MG: Anyone else understand this example? I don't
DB: You can write bad and good code in any language. The argument that perl is more inviting to non-object-oriented masterpieces is a valid point, but an unproductive one and certainly not a reason to hate the language. The values of variables in different contexts is reliable and predictable so long as you don't specifically compromise that. Context and methods of storing/retrieving values in java and perl are different, but both are effective.
MG: It is true that you can write bad and good code in any language, but some languages actually facilitate good code. Pascal requires you pre-declare variables, you will never accidently create a variable due to mis-spelling, the structure of Java means you are far more likely to include exception handling. People used Perl for web site creation because they had nothing better at the time, there are better solutions now. Don't take my
word for it, go to any job search engine and type in the keywords Perl and then java you will find vastly more Java jobs than Perl jobs. People are voting with real money for other technologies.
Marcus
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