in reply to Re: perl's forte
in thread perl's forte

Thanks, nothingmuch!

I've been pretty much puzzled why I get downvoted for genuinely wanting to seek views on something that I'm interested in or for asking questions that appear silly to some but are stumbling blocks to me.

If everybody knows perl equally, this site will become redundant. So when I get downvoted for asking a question on perl, I wonder why.

I think it would be really illuminating to the author of a node if people who downvote it can let on why they judge the node as deserving a --. I mean if you bother to downvote, you certainly can afford the energy to critique, can't you?

On that note, I thank you once again for sharing your views and for bringing the subject of downvoting up :)

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Re: Re: Re: perl's forte
by perrin (Chancellor) on Mar 19, 2004 at 04:57 UTC
    You really can't figure out why people would downvote your node? You basically said that you think perl is unpopular for web development and slow. No, not in so many words, but that is the implication, and of course a statement like that is going to annoy some people on a site for perl users.

    If you honestly just wanted to know what people think perl is best at, why start with a bunch of negative (and untrue) comments? Why not say how much you are enjoying using perl and start from there instead?

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      If you honestly just wanted to know what people think perl is best at, why start with a bunch of negative (and untrue) comments?
      Huh? I'm not quite sure if I had started with a bunch of negative (and untrue) comments. I read some responses at http://developers.slashdot.org/developers/04/03/18/2140252.shtml?tid=126&tid=169 and that set me thinking about perl's real strengths.

      I like perl for what it is and I use it for a lot of programming-related tasks. I'm amazed at how easy it is to get things done with a few lines of code. I've no reason to want to be negative about perl.

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        I thought it was something like that. You really can't take comments at Slashdot as indicative of anything beyond one person's opinion. I mean, that article is about PHP, so naturally one would expect to see a lot of pro-PHP sentiment in it.

        Re-read what you posted and try to imagine how it would sound to someone who doesn't know the context of your thinking when you wrote it. It comes off sounding like "Everyone hates perl. Do you think it's good for anything?" I don't think you meant to do that, but you have to consider your tone if you really want to get good answers from people.

        The reason I said those comments were untrue is that, well, they are. Large sites (Amazon, Yahoo, TicketMaster, Morgan Stanley, etc.) are doing major things with perl. Yahoo uses PHP now as well, but they haven't stopped using perl. There are lots of PHP fan sites on the web, but that's partly because it appeals to an audience of wannabe web designers, and has no good equivalent to CPAN for putting up shared code. PHP has some serious issues with lack of namespaces, confusing function names, etc. which many beginning programmers won't even understand as problems, never having worked on a complicated project or used those features in another language.

        Java -- I assume you're referring to the guy claiming that only J2EE is fast enough to build a site like CNN? I've seen many benchmarks involving web apps and file munging where perl comes out faster than Java. Very few large sites are actually built in Java (eBay comes to mind, but that's it). I would say Java is usually chosen for political reasons, not for technical ones.

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