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Perl6 for Mortals

Posted by michael on from the laziness-impatience-and-hubris dept.

horos1 writes: "Hey all, I just ran across an article over at O'Reilly - Perl 6: Not Just For Damians which covers a lot of the negative commentary posted by slashdot on perl6 'featureitis'. Very interesting read, and IMO makes a hell of a lot of sense."

3 of 224 comments (clear)

  1. Messing things up or using Perl for what it fits by Florian · · Score: 3, Troll
    It's not only the Perl6 code examples which look scary, most Perl code that uses advanced/obscure features already does. I am a Perl coder, but I have a hard time reading much Perl5 code out there. Perl6 seems to make things worse.

    The bottom line is that Perl is simply not the right tool for general programming purposes. I only use Perl as what it was originally intended to be - a "practical extraction and report generation language" that excels at scanning and computing huge amounts of text, as an integrated, improved replacement of the classical shell/sed/awk/grep etc. toolchain. Perl code can be readable and maintainable if it's written in C style and deliberately excludes the more esoteric features of the language. For anything else, and any "serious" - i.e. complex - programming, pick C/C++ or Python. It is no contradiction for me to concede this and still be a Perl afficionado.

    --
    gopher://cramer.plaintext.cc http://cramer.plaintext.cc:70
  2. Perl sucks by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Troll

    I think perl as a language sucks like a vacuum cleaner.

    Why? Because I've tried and tried in the past to write some small programs in perl. Each time it was a hassle to get aquinted with the stupid syntaxis. Forgot a $ sign here, did something wrong with a list there. The end result in each case was something horrible that couldn't be maintained after a few months of leaving it alone. And I don't believe it's me. People see me as a very experienced C++ developer and even give credit for the way I write perl code. But the fact remains that I can't read my own perl code after not touching it for two weeks.

    I'll never, ever write perl code again. IMO for fast admin like stuff people should use {ba,k,c}sh, sed, awk and expr.

  3. I program perl every day by Jeppe+Salvesen · · Score: 2, Troll

    I ended up with this job because it is interesting and challenging. It's a fairly major application - we sell it for some pretty serious dough.

    Anyhow - OO in Perl sucks. It's inelegant and not terribly efficient. End of discussion. No public, private, protected variables. Poor performance on inheritance and polymorphism. Should I go on? Sure, the modules use OO programming, but only a very simple subset of all the powerful concepts a real OO implementation will provide.

    Furthermore, perl has virtually no typing. The code is rarely readable, escpecially the code written by the so-called perl gurus which use all kinds of funky constructs and features that don't translate over to another language.

    The $_ variable itself is a good reason to boycott perl.

    Overall, can you do stuff like "synchronized int counter" in perl? Even the threading is not production quality. (That would have made non-blocking sockets much easier)

    However, perl has one gem. A true gem, that is a super-gun that will annihilate almost everything - it is the eval. Eval used correctly will save you hundreds of line of code. Used badly, it will slow your application to a crawl.

    But why spend lots of hours on rarely run code, when you can use an eval and do the job in an hour?

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    Stop the brainwash