use Perl

• Oh I don't know (Score:1)

  by btilly (5037)

  I'm a pretty experienced Perl programmer, but I find it easier to, say, sort an array of arrays in Ruby than it is in Perl. I also still find myself having to think about and then getting annoyed at the concept of context in Perl. So there are certainly some big Perl annoyances that don't exist in Ruby.
  
  OTOH Perl catches most of my typos for me far more conveniently than Ruby does. That fact alone is worth a lot to me.
  • Re: (Score:1)

    by chromatic (983)

    Ruby definitely has some advantages over Perl, especially with handling references (Python wins here too) and blocks (Python fails).

    I don't think Ola was talking about syntactic features though. I took that to mean advice like "Don't auto-generate subs you know you need at compile time through AUTOLOAD." and "Always use the strict and warnings pragmas for code you care about."

    That's the idiomatic level of programming, and it's a level you can't pick that up in a week by skimming the documentation.
• Oh, come on (Score:1)

  by pdcawley (485)

  There's definitely aspects of TIMTOWTDI that can create maintenance headaches when you're trying to write something that can cope with those different ways. I lost count of the hoops we had to jump through when we were writing Pixie in order to cope with the myriad ways in which objects could be represented.
  
  Then again, there's no way that Ruby would let me perform the trick of having a proxy object magically become the object it was a proxy for.
  • Re: (Score:1)

    by chromatic (983)

    I lost count of the hoops we had to jump through when we were writing Pixie in order to cope with the myriad ways in which objects could be represented.

    I agree, and I wouldn't dream of arguing otherwise. However, the conventional wisdom in the Perl world for ages was "Just bless a hash", and now that conventional wisdom is starting to be "Use an inside-out object; encapsulation is good."

    These are changes in community wisdom, not in the language, and that's the point I think Ola was trying to make.

    Y
    • Re: (Score:1)

      by hex (3272)

      conventional wisdom is starting to be "Use an inside-out object; encapsulation is good."

      It is? Since when? Christ. Should I start re-writing all my code?

      It would probably help if I finally learn what inside-out objects actually are. Every time I've tried before, my eyes have glazed over after a few lines and I've gone back to writing plain old objects that just work the way I expect them to.

      (None of this is sarcasm. Seriously.)
• The Right Way To Do It (Score:2)

  by jdavidb (1361)

  See also: The Right Way To Do It [perl.org].

  And I'm real curious what "the Perl problems" are.

  --
  J. David works really hard, has a passion for writing good software, and knows many of the world's best Perl programmers
• Ruby does have some advantages. (Score:1)

  by gdey (8475)

  The fact that Ruby has a true object model, with true data encapsulation is one major advantage over Perl. I think would and does cause problems, especially if you are not aware of it. I had a hell of a time have to re-implement (and probably doing it wrong) proper class level data encapsulation. Of course there is moose and other object frameworks that do this, but that the major stumbling block, that the native(naive) object system that everyone starts our learning and using does not do this by default.
  • Re: (Score:1)

    by chromatic (983)

    I agree. There's just one reason Perl 6 is so much nicer to use (even now in its unfinished state) than Perl 5.
    • Re: (Score:1)

      by pdcawley (485)

      Having bitched about Perl's object model, I confess that I still have a sneaking regard for it. Its very simplicity enables the cunning implementor to experiment with almost any meta object protocol they like.
      
      In a sense, Perl 5 the language doesn't provide much more than Smalltalk the language does (smalltalk message dispatch boils down to 'tell the target object to handle this message with these arguments; it's down to the target object to decide what to do with it'), but Smalltalk the environment/library
      • Re: (Score:1)

        by chromatic (983)

        What seems to be exciting the likes of Ola is that it's so much more capable than, say, Java's object system and, out of the box at least, gives you nicer objects than you get from unadorned Perl 5.

        That's completely true, and I have no objection.

        I do expect, however, people who make language comparisons to have used all of the languages they compare. It doesn't suffice to port Java's "Hello, world!" to a new language and then write about how it's impossible to do things in the new language that you d
        • Re: (Score:1)

          by pdcawley (485)

          Do want to send me a cannon I can fire Ola out of next time we're at the same conference?
          • Re: (Score:1)

            by chromatic (983)

            We've met actually. Ward Cunningham introduced us. My mind boggles sometimes.
        • Re: (Score:2)

          by pudge (1)

          Still, we've all known for a long time that I'm an unreasonable man.

          Just like Ralph Nader [wikipedia.org]! (BTW, I quite enjoyed that movie. I've always admired Nader even when I thought he was full of it, because he desires what he thinks is good for everyone, and he has principles, and actually acts on them. Imagine that. If this is at the core of being unreasonable, then we need more unreasonable people.)
• Perl on-click installer... (Score:1)

  by Alias (5735)

  I should probably avoid mentioning my idea for adding a URI handler to pip so that you can make a one-click installer web link like pip:://server/path.tar.gz :)
  
  At least until that later conversation.