in reply to Perl rocks!!!

Ok, I'll bite. I'll prolly ruffle a few feathers. But perl does indeed rock as do many things in computer science and software engineering.
# It supports quick development. I quickly came up with some working scripts within 1 hour.
# It has strong regexp support. That's exactly what we wanted.
# Fast, it is not a problem for Perl to process series of big files with lightening speed.
Point 1 - There are many languages that are quick to write in. Python, perl, Ruby, Java, C++, not asm, C maybe if you are using the GTK and/or GLIB (not glibc). Just a matter of knowing the tools, eh? ddd for C/C++, eclipse for java. I'm sure there's good stuff for Ruby.

Point 2 - I cannot think of many languages that don't have regexp support. POSIX and perl's implementations of re's have been pushed into many other languages, Either as access to the C library implementations or language native versions. jakarta-oro, a pure java implementation of RE's familiar to perl users. Sun releases one that is similar, but has it's smaller differences. (btw, php, ruby and others support re's)

Point 3 - Isn't this a case of just (os and in language) buffering? Java's IO layer isn't particularly bad. Were you thinking something specific?

perl definitely rawks, but I believe it's more for things like, it's very easy to create functions on the fly, or creating code that's very English like. Maybe even for terseness in some cases. A very clean base, vs php, but an extensive amount of modules (via CPAN). Being losely typed is nice too. No Integer.parseInt(....)s.

----
Give me strength for today.. I will not talk it away..
Just for a moment.. It will burn through the clouds.. and shine down on me.

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Re^2: Perl rocks!!!
by tomazos (Deacon) on Aug 12, 2005 at 10:10 UTC
    Ahem. Sorry something in my throat.

    1. Subjective, ignored.

    2. The regex engine in Perl has more features than the ones in Python, Ruby and Java - and is most likely faster and more robust due to how long it has been part a first-class part of the language. I've seen speed trials that are less than two years old against Python/Perl and Java/Perl. No evidence for Ruby. C++ is apples-and-oranges.

    3. I think the speed in terms of development time of dealing with large files, is where the "fast" comes from. Perl was designed with processing text files in mind, every aspect of the language is geared for it. It has been doing it for a long time and is very good at it. Try recursively processing a directory tree of files in Java to make a histogram of the occurances of words. Now do it in Perl. You will see the difference.

    4. CPAN. Enough said.

    -Andrew.

    Andrew Tomazos  |  andrew@tomazos.com  |  www.tomazos.com
[reply]
      1. You can't ignore the fact that there are tonnes of good languages. Perl is indeed one of them. Otherwise, oneday, you'll use perl for the most inappropriate thing.

      2. First to market doesn't always mean best. Altavista was great for a while. But now is google. 'sides, perl's regexp has been outwardly ported many many times.

      3. Neither is particularly hard to do. Familiarity with any given language will bring speed.

      4. The ruby and python api's are huge. php's are as well,i'll conceed, though i really don't like it. :) java is insanely huge.

[reply]

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