in reply to perl's forte

I've tried alot of languages, and I'm no expert, but Perl is my main choice. This is the way I see it:

Forget all the stuff about "strictly typed languages" etc. We are dealing with "information". The information can come in many different forms, and mean different things depending on it's form. In other languages you are stuck on the "form of the information", but in Perl you just take the information and do what you want with it. Want to treat it as text? fine, as a number? fine, as a bit stream fine. Now Perl lets you do all this without having to worry about memory management, buffer overflows, and all the other drawbacks and pitfalls of "the other languages.

Java?....yuck, I see all those class files needed just to run a little app, and I delete it.

Perl just intregrates well with the way humans see information, it's the future, regardless of what the big companies say. As systems become faster, and RAM size increases, more and more people will use Perl instead of C, because it does the same thing and is easier.

For speed, use assembly, like in all the new video animation techniques. So I think using Perl as a pre- and post-processor for feeding data to assembly subroutines is the "ultimate".

From my observations of programmers I've been acquainted with, the ones that don't like Perl are the denser ones. They don't have the brainpower or willpower to pick it up, so they say "it's junk", and move on to languages like PhP.

I'm not really a human, but I play one on earth. flash japh

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Re: Re: perl's forte
by hardburn (Abbot) on Mar 19, 2004 at 17:39 UTC

    Forget all the stuff about "strictly typed languages" etc

    Perl is strongly typed. It just have "types" in the way most programmers are used to. '$' denotes a scalar type, '@' an array type, and so on. It is very strong (there's no way to transform an array into a scalar, for instance) and behaves in a way that most programmers would expect it to (what would an array transformed into a scalar look like, anyway?).

    For the record, when speaking of type systems:

    • Strong != Strict
    • Weak != Dynamic

    These are really seperate concepts, and I wish completely different terms were used to describe them.

    The LHS is generally done at compile time, while the RHS is generally done at runtime. Strong vs. Weak deals with weather your language lets you transform one type into another. In C and Java, you can transform an int into a float through a simple cast, so they're reltively weakly typed. They also require you to explicitly define the type, so they're strictly-typed languages. Which is an annoying combination, because type errors and warnings are just as likely to be real problems as they are to be mere annoyances.

    See also: Strong Typing and Perl by MJD. Very enlightening presentation. It demonstrates that if you're going to have a type system, don't do it half-heartedly like C and Java do. Not only that, but a truely strong type system (such as in ML) can have a lot of benefits without the problems normally associated with them.

    ----
    : () { :|:& };:

    Note: All code is untested, unless otherwise stated

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