I completely agree with you, with one caveat. The abstraction has to be well designed and well optimised. Perl's regex engine is a great example of abstraction done well.

A counter example is trees & tries. These are immensely useful structures for many purposes, and there are quite a few flavours of both on CPAN. But, for the most part, they are almost useless for anything but experimentation and the most trivial of applications. They are, mostly, based upon using hashes to construct the trees, with the result that the are slow, clumsy and hugely memory hungry.

Basing my opinion only upon the little I have read here and elsewhere, not yet having succeeded in laying my hands on a copy of HOP, the main problem with the style of coding it explores is that Perl isn't sufficiently tuned for it. To see the problem, take a look at this HOP-like implementation and constrast it (performance-wise) with procedural implementation of solutions to the same problem.

That's not to say there isn't a lot to be learnt from the concepts explored in HOP, just that the costs of sub calls, coderefs and recursion in Perl 5 do not lend themselves to this type of programming where performance is a consideration.

And not all Perl apps are web applications, DB or IO bound, or otherwise "interactive" where performance can be measured in response times.

I think that we are on the same page. I am from the Java world, and in most of cases, Perl's level of abstraction is well below the level I can accept. Abstraction is not a problem to me in general, but a flag is raised when you see the performance of some HOP-like programs. Doesn't matter how important one think performance is, or what the definition of performance is, when it becomes too slow and not practical any more, that's where you start to worry.

I completely agree that Perl is not tuned for certain things.

A side note, I believe that for Perl to survive the war of languages, the real winning point is "application areas". For example, Perl was once considered the language for CGI, and that's when Perl had its most glorious time. This position is no longer there for Perl, and I see Perl's hope in the future as to re-establish its position in certain application areas, not anything else. When people pick languages, I don't think they will pick Perl because of HOP.

Did Java reach its position today because of the nice OO idea, yes but not mainly. The main reason was that it was perceived as the networking language for application areas like "internet" and "intranet" (Perception), and the strong killing will of Microsoft's rivals (Politics and Money) ;-)

A counter example is trees & tries. These are immensely useful structures for many purposes, and there are quite a few flavours of both on CPAN. But, for the most part, they are almost useless for anything but experimentation and the most trivial of applications. They are, mostly, based upon using hashes to construct the trees, with the result that the are slow, clumsy and hugely memory hungry.

I'm guessing that you mean that tries are implemented with hashes. I can't image trees implemented with arrays being that much more memory hungary than arrays alone. Sure, operations on trees will be slower than similar operations on arrays, but that's mostly comparing perl vs. C.

#!/usr/bin/perl -w
use strict;
use Data::Dumper;

my $MAX = 10000;
my $tree = make_tree($MAX/2,undef,undef);

for(my $x=1;$x<$MAX;$x++)
{
    $tree = insert(int(rand($MAX)), $tree);
}

print "sum = ", sum_tree($tree), "\n";
#print Dumper $tree;

sub sum_tree
{
    my $tree = shift;
   
    return 0 if not defined($tree);
    return node($tree) + sum_tree(right($tree)) + sum_tree(left($tree)
+);
}

sub insert
{
    (my $elem, my $tree) = @_;

    if(not defined($tree)){ return make_tree($elem, undef, undef); }
    
    my $curr = node($tree);
    if( $elem == $curr) { return $tree; }
    elsif($elem < $curr)
    {
        return make_tree($curr,
                         insert($elem,left($tree)),
                         right($tree));
    }
    elsif($elem > $curr)
    {
        return make_tree($curr,
                         left($tree),
                         insert($elem,right($tree)));
    }
}

sub make_tree { [$_[0], $_[1], $_[2]] }
sub node  { $_[0]->[0] }
sub left  { $_[0]->[1] }
sub right { $_[0]->[2] }
[download]

I can't image trees implemented with arrays being that much more memory hungary than arrays alone.

Don't imagine--measure :)

P:\test>junk
Array[ 1..10000]: 200056
Sum @array = 50005000
Tree[ 1..10000 ]: 1120016
Sum tree = 50005000
        Rate  tree array
tree  17.1/s    --  -82%
array 95.1/s  455%    --
[download]

I think that 6x bigger and 5x slower pretty much makes my point.

Read more... (2 kB)

---

Examine what is said, not who speaks -- Silence betokens consent -- Love the truth but pardon error.

Lingua non convalesco, consenesco et abolesco. -- Rule 1 has a caveat! -- Who broke the cabal?

"Science is about questioning the status quo. Questioning authority".

The "good enough" maybe good enough for the now, and perfection maybe unobtainable, but that should not preclude us from striving for perfection, when time, circumstance or desire allow.