in reply to What do you use Perl for and Why?

Why we use Perl? Well I am one member of a small team that maintains an automated file transfering system. It runs between Unix, Windows2k and Mainframes, as well as whatever our clients might happen to be using to drop off or pick up files from our site. We primarly use Perl to glue together some of the diffenent applications we use (i.e. PKZIP, PGP, SilverKey, and so forth). We were using NT command scripts on the NT side but I pushed to start using Perl there as well as on the Unix side because we could consolidate code and it would be relatively platform independent. Perl also gives us greater flexibility in scripting and it runs very fast. I've also demonstrated how fast Perl can be used to generate monthly reports from the logs that our system creates. Also, Net::SMTP makes things like email notifications quicker and require less in the way of platform specific solutions. By standardizing to one language across both of our main platforms, code developed, tested and working on one can (with some modifications) be used on the other. This also eases troubleshooting when a script breaks, you simply learn how the basics of one language works and then you don't have to switch as many mental gears when going from one platform to the other. Also, with POD, we can keep documentation within the code itself which is a big plus. Hopefully this will enable us to have a system that is relatively fault-tolerant and can be easily be maintained by future people.

"Ex libris un peut de tout"

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Re: Re: What do you use Perl for and Why?
by pg (Canon) on Oct 12, 2003 at 21:25 UTC

    Yes, Perl is fast, and that actually amazed me when I first started using Perl. That largely changed my view as what scripting language is, or to be more precise, whether Perl is still a traditional scripting language. After a while, when I realized Perl's extended coverage (thanks to Perl core modules, and mostly to CPAN.), I now no longer view Perl as (traditional) scripting language.

    A major benefit I got from Perl is that, Perl actually allows me to spend more time thinking, instead of coding. I recently wrote in Perl, a tool that analyzes the performance of our system. It basically reads a log file (that has time stamps with log msgs), and do whole bunch of regexp. It worked great. It only cost me two hours and quickly pointed out the bottle neck of our system.

    Late when someone asked why not using Java, and I told him if he could write it in Java within 10 times the size of my Perl code, I would use Java (10 times is probably a little bit ... but I don't think it is too wrong)

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