Re^4: What Perl CAN'T do?

For instance no matter how long I wait, I doubt that anyone will put on CPAN any of the reports that I need to write next week, all of which are very company specific.

While the specific items you need will never be on CPAN (because they're specific), you can definitely find a lot of glue code. When I write reporting apps, I reuse the following:

Application framework
Database access
Creating output formats (HTML, XLS, PDF, CSV, XML, etc)
Parsing input formats (xSV, XLS, PDF, XML, etc)

So, maybe the actual report doesn't reuse anything from CPAN, but everything around it does.

Also I would like to point out that the 10 to 1 productivity differences with Perl are relative to very low-level languages, like C. Even a language like Java closes a significant fraction of that gap. Plus I don't believe that Perl is significantly more productive than, say, Python or Ruby. (In fact I believe that Ruby is actually more productive than Perl!) However I'll also admit that it is hard to find many real-world examples of really long programs written in highly productive languages.

I agree with you, but Perl is definitely very productive. And, frankly, I'm trying to shift our main development to Ruby, so I agree with you on that, too. :-)

My criteria for good software:

Does it work?
Can someone else come in, make a change, and be reasonably certain no bugs were introduced?

Comment on Re^4: What Perl CAN'T do?

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Re^5: What Perl CAN'T do? by tilly (Archbishop) on Dec 16, 2005 at 00:14 UTC
Each individual report reuses the framework, yes. But I have more reports than framework. Plus the framework that I use is somewhat tied to the specifics of the local system. A random reporting tip. If you have problems with browser reports timing out, add a feature that any report that takes above a certain amount of time gets mailed to the current user. It is a simple change to make, but you will become an instant hero.	[reply]

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Re^5: What Perl CAN'T do?
by tilly (Archbishop) on Dec 16, 2005 at 00:14 UTC

A random reporting tip. If you have problems with browser reports timing out, add a feature that any report that takes above a certain amount of time gets mailed to the current user. It is a simple change to make, but you will become an instant hero.

[reply]