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Yet Another Perl Conference - Canada
minaguib writes "For anyone interested in Perl, Yet Another Perl Conference is coming to Ottawa, Canada May 15th and 16th. Pre-Registration is now open and the calendar is not completely finalized, as they are still accepting presenter entries. This is a great way to get involved either as a presenter or an attendee."
My question, however, is what are the strengths of Perl? And is it well suited for manipulating information in a database?
Manipulate the moderator system! Mod someone as "overrated" today.
Ease of use. After about a day I had an excellent understanding of both PHP and SQL. I was able to get a stable, useable and presentable website up within 24 hours of reading the basics of PHP. Learning Perl took me weeks and I'm still not even as good with it as I am with PHP. I would definitely not recommend anyone new to programming begin with Perl.
Personally, I wouldn't recommend any language that is meant for programming for a specific medium (and do not provide the argument that PHP can be used for non-web scripting -- that's just ludicrous) to be a good idea. You lose a lot of core knowledge while learning a language that is meant for that.
After all, would you really want to teach someone 'programming' by giving them a PL/SQL manual? I think not.
The OO of PHP is excellent. In my experience, it rivals Smalltalk. We all know that Perl's OO still needs work (whether or not OO is all that great is another discussion.) Hopefully Perl will be patched up so it supports such must-have OO features like introspection, reflection, self-replication and ontological data-points.
Yes, the OO in PERL is horrible. But, OO is a design methodology, one which is supported (or mandated) by some languages. For instance, take a look at the berkeley DB code. It's very OO, and pure C.
Hell, it's easy to write procedural Java, too.
Outstanding database support. PHP supports virtually every DB under the sun (although Berkeley DB is missing, oddly enough.) Perl seems limited to MySQL and PostgreSQL, and its really a kludge for the later. I've heard that this will be fixed in upcoming versions of Perl though.
Take another look. Tim Bunce, creator of DBI for perl (DataBase Interface), wrote the DBD::Oracle driver -- IIRC, this was the first DBD for DBI, which makes your point moot.
In our shop, we use Berkeley DB and Oracle, and a very minor touch of Pg and MySQL. Almost all of this is done w/ PERL.
Speed. PHP is one of the fastest languages I've ever used. While it won't be replacing assembly or C, its definitely faster than Perl in almost every case, particularly in regex which has long been Perl's strongest point. I'm sure there are cases where Perl is equal to PHP, but I can't think of any at the moment.
Do a search for 'doug bagley's language shootout'. You'll find that PHP is a much harder sell after you read this. If you want to argue about interpreter startup, take a look at mod_perl for apache. They are very comparable.
Portability. I can take PHP code off my Linux box and plop it onto an IIS server, or even one of those new Macintosh servers and have it run without having to change a single line of code. Try doing this with Perl! Its as though it was written in assembly, Perl requires that much rewriting.
I have done this a few times, and never had a problem with it. I'm not saying it doesn't exist, just that I've never had that problem. Perl on IIS also supports COM, which means you can do quite a bit with it on the windows side. You can also script it just like PHP, mixed inside the HTML (you can do it on UNIX with embperl, AxKit, and I think mason).
Graphics. PHP comes with a nice little graphics library. While I wouldn't use its to code the new Doom (VB would be a better choice) its adequate for most web pages, and should be considered as a substitute for Flash for certain things. Perl lacks a graphics library of any kind.
GD. PerlMagick. I'm going to ignore the rest of your comment (as you obviously have no clue what performance means). I wouldn't use Perl to write Doom III, either.
Data Structures. Under PHP you can create any type of datastructure you need: Linked lists, binary trees, hash tables, queues, inverse Reiser-biased recursion trees, etc. Under Perl you're extremely limited in what you can do. This is because Perl isn't OO (so you can't create Node classes, for example, usefull in a linked list) and because it lacks pointers. Some of you may notice that PHP lacks pointers, but look deeper! Behind the scenes, hidden from the user pointers are used. Because of this, PHP can support complex data structures.
Um.... You are referring to references. If PHP uses real pointers in it's scripting, garbage-collection-based language I would be SERIOUSLY amazed.
Regardless, PERL supports these too, but who the hell needs linked lists in a language which has built-in structures? If you want good examples of how various trees work, check out Mastering Algorithms in PERL, or spend 20 minutes and figure them out yourself -- it's not that hard
On this though, one has to have intimate knowledge and experience with the PERL reference-counting GC to pull off queues and any form of circularly-linked structure without creating a lot of extra overhead.
Here are some reasons I prefer Perl over PHP:
Things I hate about both languages:
I'll bite. Plus I'll throw another contender into the ring even.
Before I begin, let me just clarify something. I'm not arguing that PHP is better than Perl in all cases. There is certainly still a use for Perl. Also, PHP isn't perfect but it does manage to fix many of the shortcomings I've had with Perl.
Same here, there are cases where PHP works better than JSP. Very small, quick and dirty web scripts come to mind.
Ease of use. After about a day I had an excellent understanding of both PHP and SQL. I was able to get a stable, useable and presentable website up within 24 hours of reading the basics of PHP. Learning Perl took me weeks and I'm still not even as good with it as I am with PHP. I would definitely not recommend anyone new to programming begin with Perl.
Power and ease of use, is very often at odds. This is not always the case, but very often that's the trade-off you get with languages. Deal with it. Perl, along with JSP and other application servers give you many ways to do what is *apparently* the same thing. For example in many cases you may be able to get away with using "|", "||", or "or" in exactly the same statement and get what is to you the same effect ( if you don't care about bitwise operation or presedence).
Nice to see you got your web application up and running so quickly. Now try to connection pooling ( php persistant connections are db specific, ldap and less popular dbs don't get it ), or any other optimizations where you optimize the generation or retrival of variables or other resources by limiting that operation to once per session.
Ever wonder why so many slashdoted sites say "max connections in mysql reached"? Because often every hit is creating and closing a connection to the database. It's difficult to do any session scope or application scope optimizations using PHP. Is there a variable you need once per user session? Tough, you have to get it from the DB each hit, or store it in the URL, eg.
The OO of PHP is excellent. In my experience, it rivals Smalltalk.
Java vs. PHP's OO. Hmmm.... Grap a design pattern textbook and try implementing any non trivial pattern in PHP. PHP OO is an afterthought, and it shows.
Outstanding database support. PHP supports virtually every DB under the sun (although Berkeley DB is missing, oddly enough.)
ODBC
Speed. PHP is one of the fastest languages I've ever used.
Hah! Try a real web application. There standard PHP engine does not have an opcode optimizer. Every hit to your site is compile. While most application servers come with opcode optimizations by default. Your site is compiled on startup or on the first hit only. Afterwards the in memory code is executed. Even if you use a PHP opcode optimizer, it would be interesting to see PHP vs Tomcat. My money's on Tomcat.
Portability.
JAVA. Nuff said. There's isn't 20 different dependent libraries at compile time, or realizing that you need to recompile PHP because you don't have PDF lib support built in. That's suppose to change soon, I hear, but until then.
Graphics
Java2D
Data Structures. Under PHP you can create any type of datastructure you need: Linked lists, binary trees, hash tables, queues, inverse Reiser-biased recursion trees, etc.
Check out java.util .
PHP alright, but isn't all that hot. I still use PHP for small scripts that few people use ( eg. scripts to add/del IMAP or LDAP users for instance which only a small number of admins use), but the truth is most application servers would eat its lunch.
Based on upvotes, Ageism is the only "-ism" Slashdotters care about and think isn't SJW
YAPC is also coming to Boca Raton, Florida. Hopeful speakers should volunteer their time for lightning talks and general speech topics soon!
http://www.yapc.org/America/venue.shtml
They didn't list it on the "Seeing Boca Raton" section, but there are other things to do in the Boca area, such FLUX (Florida Linux Users eXchange - http://www.flux.org/) and the 2600 meeting (not to mention Sawgrass Mills Mall which is an attraction all it's own - just come on a friday night).
You must have really had your nose in the books. Ottawa is also home to OLS, :)
OSW,
the GCC Summit, and the Kernel Summit (see http://lwn.net/Articles/3467/ ). Other stuff too.
Fucking moderators. It's not even new. Turn your brains on before giving out the "Interesting" points to stupid arguments from "eggtroll".
The Geek Cruises certainly are great, I haven't gone on any but the list of luminaries that give presentations are impressive, and I've heard good things about them. Is the Ottawa YAPC turning into a marketing scheme at all? ExitCertified has been quite active & helpful for not only the local PerlMongers group, but also the Ottawa Unix Users' Group (OCUUG); as you'll notice from their Meetings page, they're actually held every month at ExitCertified. There's also substantial cross-pollination between ExitCertified people, the Ottawa Capital Linux Users' Group (OCLUG which hold monthly meetings just around the corner from ExitCertified, hmmm...), as well as PMs and some of the same suspicious characters can be seen at the Macintosh User's Group of Ottawa (MUGOO) (ahem, Jay et al)
These nefarious groups indeed seem to be as thick as theives. But if a firm like ExitCertified is devoting their time, office space, and personnel to so much in the local OSS/programming communities, haven't they earned the respect of our community? Just because they're an active company dosen't mean they're all bad. I wouldn't worry about the vacancies either; speakers were still being lined up for the local Open Source Weekend/Business Of Open Source Conference (BOSS) held a few weeks ago in the city and look who showed up.
All you Americans can attend "half price" because of our sagging currency/exchange rate, while us "Canadians" can't afford to buy lunch there let alone travel.
You haven't been watching the exchange rate recently, have you? 12 months ago, 1 U.S. dollar was worth $1.60 Canadian, but my last exchange occurred at the rate of $1.47, and the U.S. dollar is still dropping in value.
Whoever is in charge of the dollar policy in the U.S. recently changed. The previous guy was an advocate of a strong U.S. dollar (I'm not sure why), but the new guy realizes that was hurting U.S. exports, so you can expect the rate to settle somewhere around $1.35 to $1.40 after the dust settles. That would at least bring it inline with purchasing power on both sides of the border.
It will also bring comparative salaries more inline on both sides, so it might slow down the "brain drain" of Canadian talent to the U.S.
"I have never let my schooling interfere with my education." - Mark Twain