use Perl

• It's a mind set thing (Score:1)

  by Adrian (66)

  Just like people never seeing OO or declarative solutions to problems if all they've ever used is FP.
  
  If you've come from a background where you take source files, compile them, and get running code out the other side then making that mental leap of going in the other direction is hard.
  • Re: (Score:2)

    by Ovid (2709)

    The potentially fatal flaw in the plan:

    #!/usr/bin/perl -l
    
    use strict;
    use warnings;
    
    a();
    a();
    
    sub a {
        b();
        print 'whoops!';
    }
    
    sub b {
        no warnings 'redefine';
        *a = sub {
            b();
            print "hi there!";
        };
    }

    This is obvious in retrospect. I can't imagine this would be easy to get around.
• different niche, different style (Score:1)

  by educated_foo (3106)

  Although I know there are people out there writing large, long-running apps in Perl, I think a lot Perl programs are simply not well-suited to this style of development. For example, I do a lot of data munging and interpretation in Perl, i.e. small, separate transformations on large piles of text. From within Emacs, I can interact with Perl through either an inferior shell or an interactive interpreter (via Sepia). Even when I have both open, I usually find myself testing snippets in Sepia, but doing mos