Re: How has Perl saved you time at your job this week|month|year|decade?

So, how has Perl saved you time at your job recently?

This is a question that pops up over and over again. There are usually lots of people giving answers, but almost always the answer means "programming saved me some time". It just happens that in a Perl forum, most people use Perl as their main tool. But over at forum X-monks, people solve almost identical problem using language X.

Over the years, I got paid to solve computer related problems. Perl has been my favourite tool. And sure, the tools I wrote in Perl saved time over doing it by hand - but I got paid to do it in a faster way than doing it by hand. And if I hadn't learn Perl, I might have learned Python or Ruby or REXX or be better at using the sh/awk/C trident, and would have solved to problems by using whatever language(s) I had learned instead.

Comment on Re: How has Perl saved you time at your job this week\|month\|year\|decade?

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Re^2: How has Perl saved you time at your job this week\|month\|year\|decade? by Porculus (Hermit) on Apr 06, 2009 at 21:16 UTC
I have to disagree. It's true that Perl is not the only language that saves people time, and it's true that many of the things people mention in threads like this could have been done equally well in Python, say. But it's not true that anything Turing-complete is equally good at time-saving. In my case, when I say "Perl saved me time", I typically mean "CPAN saved me time". The extraordinary depth and variety of libraries available at the touch of a button does make a real difference in my work, and does save me a significant amount of effort relative to working in some other languages, such as C++. Even for languages with rich libraries, the learning curve for those libraries may differ wildly. Just recently I needed to produce a simple GUI application in a hurry. I wasn't familiar with any of the options. I actually gave some serious thought to using Java, since that would have had certain advantages in this instance. But I took a long hard look at Swing, and then I took a short hard look at Perl/Tk,* and it was quite simply a good order of magnitude simpler. It would have taken me several days to get anything working in Java, while with Perl/Tk I had a functional prototype by the end of the afternoon. (Could Tcl have saved me just as much time? I doubt it; I was using a number of other CPAN libraries in the same project. Did Perl itself have anything to do with the simplicity? Yes; it has proper closures with a lightweight syntax, which makes defining callbacks much simpler than Java's cumbersome anonymous-inner-class approach. Am I claiming it's better than Java for all purposes? Not at all. I would hesitate to deploy a Perl/Tk app enterprise-wide; Java's lack of expressiveness comes hand-in-hand with a much greater availability of maintenance programmers, and I have no end of respect for their remarkable ability to tolerate endless VerboseBoilerplateFactoryVisitors.) * And some sidelong glances at Gtk2, etc, but Perl/Tk was already installed on all the servers, and that's a BIG bonus.	[reply]

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Re^2: How has Perl saved you time at your job this week|month|year|decade?
by Porculus (Hermit) on Apr 06, 2009 at 21:16 UTC

I have to disagree. It's true that Perl is not the only language that saves people time, and it's true that many of the things people mention in threads like this could have been done equally well in Python, say. But it's not true that anything Turing-complete is equally good at time-saving.

In my case, when I say "Perl saved me time", I typically mean "CPAN saved me time". The extraordinary depth and variety of libraries available at the touch of a button does make a real difference in my work, and does save me a significant amount of effort relative to working in some other languages, such as C++.

Even for languages with rich libraries, the learning curve for those libraries may differ wildly. Just recently I needed to produce a simple GUI application in a hurry. I wasn't familiar with any of the options. I actually gave some serious thought to using Java, since that would have had certain advantages in this instance. But I took a long hard look at Swing, and then I took a short hard look at Perl/Tk,* and it was quite simply a good order of magnitude simpler. It would have taken me several days to get anything working in Java, while with Perl/Tk I had a functional prototype by the end of the afternoon.

(Could Tcl have saved me just as much time? I doubt it; I was using a number of other CPAN libraries in the same project. Did Perl itself have anything to do with the simplicity? Yes; it has proper closures with a lightweight syntax, which makes defining callbacks much simpler than Java's cumbersome anonymous-inner-class approach. Am I claiming it's better than Java for all purposes? Not at all. I would hesitate to deploy a Perl/Tk app enterprise-wide; Java's lack of expressiveness comes hand-in-hand with a much greater availability of maintenance programmers, and I have no end of respect for their remarkable ability to tolerate endless VerboseBoilerplateFactoryVisitors.)

* And some sidelong glances at Gtk2, etc, but Perl/Tk was already installed on all the servers, and that's a BIG bonus.

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