in reply to Re^2: Perl: friend or foe ?
in thread Perl: friend or foe ?

Good stuff,

BUT, is perl used for such tasks as instrument interaction (lab equipment, or printer control), or some stand-alone package like a word processor or photo editor.

I understand the above reply, but to me it seems as if they are web applications. Does this wide use still apply to desktop applications?

My other question would be, why progress in creating a language has not turned to utilising the best from all other languages, like SQL database queries, C++ and Java object orientation, Perl text and mudule interaction etc. etc.

Im still interested in other peolpes view so keep them coming.

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Re^2: Perl: friend or foe ?
by g0n (Priest) on Apr 24, 2005 at 14:42 UTC
    Re your second question, I would say that perl has a tendency to do exactly that. Not only in allowing one to inline code from other languages, but in adopting facilities from other languages as it develops between versions; overloading and extension by modules etc.

    Take for example PDL. It's still recognisably perl, but perl extended in a particular direction, adopting functionality from Matlab.

    The community developed/supported nature of perl means that, if someone sees a need for a particular facility, they will very often write it as a module. Class::HPLOO for example allows one to create OO classes in a manner rather more like java. DBD::LDAP offers a degree of SQL syntax interaction with LDAP.

    Perl has, IMHO, the biggest range of functionality of any programming language. A one liner can sometimes perform tasks that would require many lines in e.g. a shell script, and at the opposite end of the scale a fully functional GUI app can be written in perl. The fact that perl is so easy to use for quick and dirty fixup scripts perhaps leads people to underestimate the power and flexibility that it is capable of.

    Update: As far as heavy use goes, I use perl for neural nets, which involves a very large number of FP calculations. It's not as quick as C - it's reputed to be 20-30% slower. But it's a lot easier to dig around in the guts of the code, and runtime compilation means I can modify the code, and not have to wait half an hour for the app to build before using it.

    g0n, backpropagated monk
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Re^2: Perl: friend or foe ?
by merlyn (Sage) on Apr 24, 2005 at 14:42 UTC
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In Section Seekers of Perl Wisdom