in reply to (A6) Perl 6, a general-purpose language?

To me, Perl is a general-purpose language, if you look at the coverage of its function, and the coverage of CPAN modules. I see general-purpose language as a concept against specific purpose language. (Let's don't get into the discussion of the definition of general-purpose language, that could lead to lengthy but pointless discussion ;-)

The real point is that every language has its own strength and weakness, regardless whether it is Perl, c, c++, Java, or whatever.

As I said, Perl+CPAN already has a very wide coverage, but that does not mean Perl is the best choice for everything it covers. Whether a language covers something is totally different from whether it is the best tool to deal with that thing.

Perl 6 will be quite different from Perl 5, and it will have a longer list of major strength, and a shorter list of major weakness. That's for sure.

As Perl monks, obviously we appreciate Perl's strength more than anyone else does, but we should also have a clear picture of Perl's weakness, so that we are able to make the right use of Perl, and avoid forcing it into the corner.

  • Comment on Re: (A6) Perl 6, a general-purpose language?

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Re: (A6) Perl 6, a general-purpose language?
by crenz (Priest) on Mar 11, 2003 at 08:59 UTC

    I can see we probably have very different definitions of "general-purpose language" :-). You referred me to CPAN. I do audio processing with perl myself, but I keep it to MIDI data. I don't think perl is fast enough to do Wave data processing in real-time, or image processing. Well, there are image processing modules on CPAN, but these are written in C, with perl glue code.

    Maybe the real problem is that I am expecting things of Perl it was not originally meant to do. For me, one of my dreams is to write well-performing desktop apps in perl*. Yes, I know about WxPerl, PerlTk etc., but I wouldn't want to use them for a major project (I know others do). I find the startup time and performance not up to what I would want it to be. The point is probably moot with modern 3-Ghz machines, but I am still working mostly on 200-500 Mhz Pentiums or G4s these days.

    *and I realize most people here aren't interested in that at all.

[reply]
      Have you looked into AutoLoader or SelfLoader? Startup time of perl itself is rarely an issue - it's mainly the compilation that may take a while. Delayed loading should cure most of the problem.

      Makeshifts last the longest.

[reply]
      yep, i see this as one of the weakest parts and one of the ways to boost perl usage.. I havent seen many standalone-graphic apps written in perl even that there is ports of gtk,qt,wxWindows or so...
      Probably 'cause of the lack of integrated IDE similar like Delphi/Kylix ...
      probably adding some primitives directly available into parrot can boost the thing a bit.. dont understand these things so that just mumbling :")
[reply]

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