Re^3: Java Vs Perl

Just look at two hot things of the last decade: threads and Unicode. Perl has had several thread implementations, and several Unicode implementations, and despite having worked on it for years, it still doesn't get it right.

Uhhh ... I've been programming exclusively in Perl for over 4 years and on and off for 8 years prior to that. I have never once programmed anything threaded. Ever. In fact, I would say that most programmers in the world have never knowingly handled threading issues.

And, no, I don't count Java's auto-threading of all applications to be relevant to the discussion. Threading is much harder than managing database connections and programmers writing in Java seem to get the latter wrong a heck of a lot more often than programmers writing in Perl.

As for Unicode ... what does 5.8.x not do that it should? (Discount regular expressions for a second because, AFAIK, Perl has the best Unicode regular expression support anywhere.) I work with web apps that have to seamlessly render pages in at least 5 languages, with one up to 12 languages. CJK, Arabic, and Latin-1 are all handled without a problem. More often than not, it's Oracle or Sybase that screws it up, not Perl.

Being right, does not endow the right to be rude; politeness costs nothing.
Being unknowing, is not the same as being stupid.
Expressing a contrary opinion, whether to the individual or the group, is more often a sign of deeper thought than of cantankerous belligerence.
Do not mistake your goals as the only goals; your opinion as the only opinion; your confidence as correctness. Saying you know better is not the same as explaining you know better.

Comment on Re^3: Java Vs Perl

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Re^4: Java Vs Perl by Anonymous Monk on Jan 11, 2005 at 14:36 UTC
I've been programming exclusively in Perl for over 4 years and on and off for 8 years prior to that. I have never once programmed anything threaded. Ever. In fact, I would say that most programmers in the world have never knowingly handled threading issues. I've been programming Perl for 10 years now, but I've never programmed anything with mod_perl or the DBI. Ever. And that's probably true for most programmers in the world. But that doesn't mean that mod_perl or the DBI aren't hot or important. It doesn't matter whether programmers get it right. Fact is, there is a demand for threaded applications. Whether it's useful or not. And when programmed right, threading in Java works a lot more efficient than in Perl (where threads is such a bane that by default if you compile Perl, threads are disabled). It's like vitamine pills. Whether they work or not - there's a demand for them. And that (partially) explains why Java is "bigger" than Perl. As for Unicode, I don't have my p5p archive here, and I'm not going to look up the online archives, but there are still a lot of bugs/glitches coming by on the mailinglist.	[reply]
Re^4: Java Vs Perl by Anonymous Monk on Jan 13, 2005 at 18:16 UTC
I believe Merlyn once said that (roughly), the answer to the question of forking is "don't". Fork works, especially if on *nix. It's simple. If on a Windows system, fork emulation w/ ActiveState is still better than threading. If something "must" be threaded, it can also usually be written with subprocesses. GUI apps must be threaded to not lose responsiveness when doing slow things , that's about it.	[reply]