in reply to Migrating from Perl to other language? Why would someone do that?

"Another guy stated that Python/Ruby are truly Object Oriented languages and it makes more sense to learn them."

This begs the question of whether a language has to be object-oriented to be worthwhile. Haskell (for example) is a very elegant programming language, but doesn't do OO at all.

And although Perl's built-in OO requires a little manual work, it's extremely flexible, supporting OO concepts like multiple inheritance that many other OO languages do not (including Ruby, Java and PHP).

It's flexible enough to build things like Moose on top of - and I'd argue that Moose offers a more powerful OOP framework than almost any other programming language. (Scala is probably the most mainstream programming language that offers OOP that rivals the Moose.)

"The question that's stuck in my mind though, is, why are people moving "away" from Perl?"

Don't believe the hype. Sure plenty of people are moving away from Perl, but many more than that seem to be moving towards it. Measuring such things as these directly is difficult, but there are proxy measurements.

use Moops; class Cow :rw { has name => (default => 'Ermintrude') }; say Cow->new->name
  • Comment on Re: Migrating from Perl to other language? Why would someone do that?

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Re^2: Migrating from Perl to other language? Why would someone do that?
by einhverfr (Friar) on Nov 23, 2013 at 13:20 UTC
    I would argue from what I have seen that Lisp's CLOS rivals Moose. Unfortunately CLOS's learning curve is, well, legendary.
[reply]

      Indeed; CLOS was in fact one of the inspirations for Moose. However, it would be a bit of a stretch to call Lisp mainstream; it's barely used outside academia/Emacs.

      use Moops; class Cow :rw { has name => (default => 'Ermintrude') }; say Cow->new->name
[reply]
      I find CLOS quite easy to learn.
[reply]
Re^2: Migrating from Perl to other language? Why would someone do that?
by taint (Chaplain) on Nov 22, 2013 at 02:06 UTC
    "...Sure plenty of people are moving away from Perl..."

    With all due respect, tobyink; How do you know? What makes you think so? I'd dearly love to see your stats.

    For example; If someone should call me a derogatory name, must I feel compelled to respond? I'd argue not. If a person is relatively comfortable with themselves. Why would they care? I wouldn't.

    It is in this same vein, that I would suggest. If a person recognizes the advantages, and chooses Perl. Why would/should they feel compelled to argue against rubbish -- like perls before swine, as it were. I'd also contend, that the type of people that choose Perl, in the first place, are of a type that clearly see the BS, and choose not to bother with it. Seeing it for what it is.

    --Chris

    #!/usr/bin/perl -Tw
use Perl::Always or die;
my $perl_version = (5.12.5);
print $perl_version;
[reply]

      "With all due respect, tobyink; How do you know? What makes you think so?"

      Because this is true for any mainstream programming language - there are always people abandoning the language for pastures new, and new people discovering the language; there are organizations rewriting a legacy application in a different language (in fact, choosing a different language to rewrite a legacy system is a good idea - it helps ensure crufty parts of the old system don't get kept around for convenience); people switching jobs and having to adjust to a new development environment.

      use Moops; class Cow :rw { has name => (default => 'Ermintrude') }; say Cow->new->name
[reply]
        I'm not so sure.

        It's all so; he said, she said, they say. They, say alot of things. But, to date, I have yet to ever meet they.

        While I'm sure that to some extent, what you say is true. I'd really love to see some numbers.

        All the best, tobyink.

        --Chris

        #!/usr/bin/perl -Tw
use Perl::Always or die;
my $perl_version = (5.12.5);
print $perl_version;
[reply]

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