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Perl6 for Mortals
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."
Ever met a black chess player? No, the reason is very simple. Black tribes live in Africa and due to low quality food their brain is smaller, therefore they are less intelligent then the average white guy. They might have a larger dick, but with such a small brain (like yours) is not very useful, unless your idea of a cool woman is a $5 crack whore which most blacks seem to be happy with.
That stoopid camel spit on me one too many times! i'll conan-the-barbarian him in dah face is he does it again.
.cig
You can get syphilis from being spit on by an infected camel.
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
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.
Communist Perl Archives for Newbies.
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?
Stop the brainwash