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Nokia to Port Perl to Mobiles

Posted by CowboyNeal on from the not-just-for-dialing-scripts dept.

jonknee writes "MobileTracker notes that Nokia has made it clear that the Perl scripting language is coming to its popular Series 60 devices. This will be a huge boon to mobile software. Just look what happened to the web when CGI got popular. A time frame was not announced."

2 of 258 comments (clear)

  1. This is a great idea by cervo · · Score: 4, Interesting

    the current choices (C++, Java) are overkill for a lot of applications

    They are right, for ripping info off of web pages and stuff you just can't compare C++ and Java to Perl because of the overhead, kudos. Now you can make perl scripts to provide real time quotes off of various websites very quickly, this is great news.

  2. Language Thrashing by fm6 · · Score: 5, Interesting
    Nokia seems to be thrashing around for better language support. They started with the Symbian SDK, which uses Visual C++ as an IDE. Then there was Java, which traditionally has used Vi or EMACS as a sort of IDE. Then they seem to have decided that they needed better IDEs, so they made expensive deals with Borland's C++ and Java business units. (These BUs are part of one small company, but in a very real sense they're direct competitors.) Now they seem to think that a good scripting language is the missing link.

    I was at Borland when the C++ effort started scaling up, and there was a lot of enthusiasm among people who thought that there was going to be a huge demand for personal device apps. Obviously there's the same feeling at Nokia, only more so. I suspect that this market is not living up to expectation -- the only apps that generate any buzz are phonecams and games, and there's only so much market for those. Nokia seems to think that there'd be more cool apps if there were more and better development tools. I really doubt that this is the problem.