Re: Is there ever a time Perl is the wrong choice?

Other posters have spoken on the technical reasons not to use Perl. Basically, anytime you have to do something faster than a human can respond in less than (essentially) infinite RAM, you might not want Perl (but Perl will probably still do a decent job).

On another note, a lot of people discuss the fact if all you have is a hammer, everything you see is a nail. A lot of languages are like this. However, Perl isn't just a hammer. It is a complete toolbox, with a bulldozer and 90-foot crane, even! This makes it pre-eminently suited to nearly any job you would want to tackle. (And, frankly, nearly every job you would want to tackle with it, some kind soul already has contributed a module in CPAN to help.)

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Don't go borrowing trouble. For programmers, this means Worry only about what you need to implement.

Comment on Re: Is there ever a time Perl is the wrong choice?

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Re: Re: Is there ever a time Perl is the wrong choice? by Nkuvu (Priest) on Feb 06, 2003 at 20:18 UTC
Good point. For the past two years or so, I've been writing a lot of Perl scripts to help with some analysis of our project. Specifically, I have a lot of Perl scripts that can open and read Excel files and retrieve information, and compile that information into a new Excel file. My supervisor came to me not too long ago and asked me to write a script which would go through a huge Excel file (on the order of 12MB) and do a quick parsing of the text. The primary problem with the file as it was hinged on the fact that there was a series of extra characters in each cell. I don't remember exactly what the characters were, but a simple Find/Replace from within Excel reduced the problem to triviality. As much as I love writing Perl scripts, this was not a good case for one. And as soon as I mentioned the Find/Replace, my supervisor could have kicked himself. He just saw a problem that Perl would be able to fix, and didn't think of anything else. :)	[reply]

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Re: Re: Is there ever a time Perl is the wrong choice?
by Nkuvu (Priest) on Feb 06, 2003 at 20:18 UTC

For the past two years or so, I've been writing a lot of Perl scripts to help with some analysis of our project. Specifically, I have a lot of Perl scripts that can open and read Excel files and retrieve information, and compile that information into a new Excel file.

My supervisor came to me not too long ago and asked me to write a script which would go through a huge Excel file (on the order of 12MB) and do a quick parsing of the text. The primary problem with the file as it was hinged on the fact that there was a series of extra characters in each cell. I don't remember exactly what the characters were, but a simple Find/Replace from within Excel reduced the problem to triviality.

As much as I love writing Perl scripts, this was not a good case for one. And as soon as I mentioned the Find/Replace, my supervisor could have kicked himself. He just saw a problem that Perl would be able to fix, and didn't think of anything else. :)

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