use Perl

• making hard things easier (Score:1)

  by dagolden (6584)

  I tend to think of this along the lines of "making hard things easy and impossible things merely hard". With that in mind, the frontier has shifted since Perl was developing rapidly.

  My gut feeling is that the "wow" factor has become harder for Perl to achieve because what wows people isn't insanely great string, dataset and administrative task manipulation. People want to see results quickly. That's not just about the learning curve -- it's the end-to-end process.

  Part of the advantage of Java in an educa
  • Re:making hard things easier (Score:2)

    by nicholas (3034) <nwc10+useperl@colon.colondot.net> on 2010.02.09 5:06 (#71636) Homepage Journal

    On parallel processing:

    There's got to be a better way to do this.

    No dynamic language has found it yet. Even 2 full time Google engineers have failed to find it for Python [google.com]

    CPython has a Global Interpreter Lock, single threads the interpreter, and hence single threads compute intensive task. [C]Ruby has "green threads" (i.e. it does the thread scheduling). There's no prior art. There's no proof that the problem even has a solution.

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    • Re: (Score:1)

      by tsee (4409)

      It's really hard to imagine a solution. Particularly in perl. In the face of automatic conversion of SVs on read access in new contexts, this seems utterly impossible without crazy locking.
    • Re: (Score:1)

      by gravity (9053)

      As I noted above, Clojure is a dynamic language that provides a solution. There is prior art, it just doesn't look or feel like Perl/Python/Ruby.
      • Re: (Score:2)

        by nicholas (3034)

        Sorry, I wasn't clear enough. My fault. Prior art for a dynamic language implemented in C. Clojure is a dynamic programming language that targets the Java Virtual Machine. (To the best of my knowledge) Jython does threads just fine - it's CPython that can't, and even the folks at Google working on Unladen Swallow can't see how to take that Jython know-how and port it to the C implementation.
        • Re: (Score:1)

          by gravity (9053)

          I don't think there's anything stopping Clojure from being implemented in C if they actually wanted it. The problem for CPython and Perl isn't that they're in C, but that the entire language is based on the idea of default mutability. Clojure was designed from the ground up with a different multicore-focused approach to state in mind, which is why it works. You'd have to fundamentally change Python and Perl as languages, no matter what their implementation, to get them to do handle threading well.
          • Re: (Score:2)

            by nicholas (3034)

            Good point.

            Sadly, once again the punchline from the "Irishman giving directions" joke bites:

            If I were you sir, I wouldn't start from here.