Perl no longer holds an obvious upper hand on code length, especially considering that we can drop the Java example from eight lines to five with some whitespace manipulation.

I quite agree. As I was reading your deconstruction of the Perl/Java comparison, I thought about some code I wrote the other day.

I'm dealing with a big system at the moment, and in one place I have some database queries that return a dozen records or so of a thousand or more columns. I wanted to look at the result sets in Excel to trace a bug. So I extracted the query and recorded the results as a tab-delimited file. Load it into Excel.

Boom.

Turns out Excel has some really feeble limit on the number of columns a spreadsheet may contain. So I scratched my head for a moment, and thought... hmm, just have to transpose the rows and columns in the file, and I can load the transposed data in Excel and get on with the job.

I was going to paste the code here, but then I realised that it's sitting on a Windows server at work, so I'd have to log in through a VPN and dick around to get it out.

And then it occurred to me that if it took me about two minutes to write the code then, I could rewrite it again from memory. Here's the code, or something close to what I wrote. I typed this in, and compiled it, and it ran the very first time. I had to ponder the push statement for about 10 seconds, but that's it. And here it is:

use strict;
use warnings;

my @trans;
while (<DATA>) {
    chomp;
    my @row = split /\t/;
    push @{$trans[$_]}, $row[$_] for 0..$#row;
}

print join( "\t", @$_ ), "\n" for @trans;

__DATA__
A    B    C    D    E    F    G    H
1    1    2    3    8    0    7    9
3    5    3    3    5    5    3    3

[download]

So there you have it. I imagine something like that is not going to come out at even 20 lines of Java, but if you want to take a stab at it, I'd be very interested at seeing even a rough sketch.

I'm not saying that my code is particularly clever or efficient, but it solved a specific problem in about as much time as it took me to write the code (although to be fair I did have a couple of off-by-one errors the first time around).

That's why I program in Perl.

• another intruder with the mooring in the heart of the Perl

In reply to Re^3: Interesting read: "Why I use perl and still hate dynamic language weenies too" by grinder
in thread Interesting read: "Why I use perl and still hate dynamic language weenies too" by ghenry

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