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Nokia to Port Perl to Mobiles
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."
This will be a huge boon to mobile software.
What? Please elaborate how perl can help in front-end applications for mobile phones.
In that case, how long until shitstorm.pl gets launched from a cellphone?
I was thinking of getting a Sony Ericcson phone, but if the Nokia will have a Perl port available, I might wait a bit longer before getting a replacement for my existing one :-)
Oolite: Elite-like game. For Mac, Linux and Windows
This is so great - instead of using the built-in PDA contact manager functions of our phones, us geeks will be able to craft perl scripts with regexes to look up people's phone numbers...
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.
Just think...turn your ringing option to vibrate and then run the pleasure program. Insert phone in front pocket and enjoy!
There is no spoon or sig.
The web exploded - suddenly hundreds of thousands of dynamic sites, and sites with at least some dynamic content, sprang up in an amazingly short amount of time. The web was transformed from a purely flat, static medium to a dynamic one.
But mobile phones aren't static. The more modern ones can already run applications written in C/C++ or Java. Simply adding support for perl merely increases the number of people who could write code for them. The difference is nowhere near as great as CGI vs custom web server was.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying that this is a bad thing, by any means. I just don't see it having quite the same degree of impact as the poster.
It's official. Most of you are morons.
It already takes me forever to enter names and phone numbers on a cell keypad. I am going to love finding how to do a % or a @.
Anyone who has done any development on Nokias phones knows that Nokia is very 'bullet point' when it comes to supporting them. Their Java support for MIDP2.0 for example is a complete joke. Its horribly broken and Nokia knows it - basic applications from tutorials sometimes don't work properly or don't work in certain firmware batches of phones. What they NEED to do is get some quality control in place instead of adding a 'language of the year' to their platforms.
How would I get the shebang line up using predictive text input?
John, I'm Only Dancing!
There is some more information here if anyone is interested.
... or how paying $2 per kilobyte (thank you, local carrier) makes those four words the most expensive data message ever sent, at an average of 50 lines of code to produce the later ones people came up with!
Now if only Siemens ported Python, that would be cool.
I mean, I's rather use Perl than Java for many tasks, but if Nokia wanted a good, clean interpreted language, why not Ruby, which has the power of Perl but a far cleaner design.
Java is the blue pill
Choose the red pill
Forget the tutorials, yes the documentation is often not up to date, however, there are better places to learn midp programming than Nokia tutorials. There is *nothing* Nokia specific to midp programming!
Point some midp2.0 that works on any phone but a Nokia please? I haven't seen any!
Bugs in Nokia software? Certainly! Midp2.0 completely broken? No way!
...now I can host my own slash based site using my cell phone :)
The IT section color scheme sucks.
"We are unable to complete your call. Please hang up and try the -w option."
How about a link to the better, more informative article where the actual information lies?
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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.
Slashdot server will be moved to run on Nokia mobile phone. A slight lag might appear after the change.
CGI was the first easy way to program interactive web pages, as far as I know (it was a bit before my time), and perl was one of the languages you could use (along with C++, and pretty much anything else). But how does being able to write programs in perl on a device you can already code in C/C++ or java give you any huge advantage, unless you only know perl? I'm sure there are people who like to do all their coding in Perl, but unless you're one of them, this doesn't seem like much of a deal. Certanly nothing compared to CGI on the web. (And lets not forget that CGI was a pretty early tech, that came about when the web wasn't much. While CGI probably helped a lot, the web itself was pretty compelling, and growing quickly on it's own).
... simple code ...}}).
Also, how exactly is java "overkill" for these devices? People talk about how a hello world app is 5 lines of code, but those few lines are constants that are going to be in any small app (i.e. public class Classname{ public static void main(String args[]){
If they're talking about running time, they're probably wrong too. Perl is interpreted, while java runs in a VM. I don't know if they use JIT on moble devices, but java will still be faster then Perl.
So how is java 'overkill'? This is certainly good news for perl buffs, but I don't know why the rest of us should care.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
Is this poster crazy?! To suggest that the sudden surge in web usage was down to CGI is frankly ludicrous! There is no way you can say, "right, that technology lead to the boom in the web". Its not possible! And even if you could pin it down to one thing, it would be something Many, many, many technologies have helped it along the way.
Further, perl is not the only scripting language on the internet; furthermore i doubt it is the most popular. PHP, ASP, Java; all popular and equally efficient languages.
CGI was the first easy way to program interactive web pages, as far as I know (it was a bit before my time), and perl was one of the languages you could use...
While you can use Perl to write CGI, Perl doesn't really have anything to do with CGI coding. You talk alot about CGI, not Perl, I don't see your point? CGI is totally irrelevant to mobile phones...?
Saying that Perl is used to write CGI scripts is like saying Java is used for writing web applets. Yes, you can write applets in Java, but most of the people I know don't.
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Perl is probably fine for half arsed system scripts that don't exceed 50 lines or so, but it is a hindrance and an abomination to a professional development environment
Perl can be used by people who are not professional developers--people like "half arsed system" administrators who like to actually do useful things. Non-technical people can do things with Perl, too. Granted, sometimes they make awful mistakes, and on a networked device, that's scary. But tools for the n0n-l33t are a Good Thing, except maybe for some 3(g0)l33t15t5.
Call me old-fashioned, but I like simple things to be simple. I've written about this before, but it seems like java wonks can't write a hello world with out also generating a "HelloWorld" class, and about 500 classes (not lines of code, but classes to go along with it. I'm getting pretty pissed off about it.
Not all problems require an OO solution. The majority of all problems don't require an OO solution. When you're doing something simple, the code should be simple as well. Why invent zillions of java classes and interfaces when 5 or 10 lines of perl code will do? IMO, this is the overkill that people speak of.
And, as we all know, complicated things are just layered simple things, so perl does well for complicated things, too. Very well, in fact.
Perl is interpreted,...
This is a common mispercption about perl. Perl is what mainframers used to call a "compile and go" language (I used to do all my MNF programming as compile and go, but then I had unlimited machine time). Perl is compiled down to an optree, and the the optree is run by the perl runtime (which is essentailly a VM, but the perl folks don't like to call it that). This all happens transparently. An interpeted language is quite a different thing.
I have my doubts. All the language performance comparisions I've read never take into account that perl programs are compiled just before they are run. I'd wager that if this was taken into account, then their performace would be fairly similar. (Of course, anyone can write inefficient programs in any language).
In the course of every project, it will become necessary to shoot the scientists and begin production.
I'm going to stick my neck out and say I like Perl -- so I think this is good news. However, I've always thought of Perl as a text-processing language, and In My Limited Experience, mobile phones can only fit about ten words on the screen. {on the other hand, this could simply lead to phones with bigger screens.}
There's no denying that you can write really ugly code in Perl, but you can also write beautiul code in Perl. I think some of the people who knock Perl are confusing "undisciplined" with "not anal retentive". Perl was always based around the idea of serving the end rather than the means -- it's about where you're at, rather than how you got there. It does not impose a particular style on the programmer. Thus, for any given task, there could be many, many ways to accomplish it in Perl.
They're all right.
Some will be faster than others, some will use fewer resources than others, some will look prettier then others when viewed as source. But if you don't care enough about those things to mention them in the design spec, then they don't matter.
Now, you can have your fancy object-oriented stuff, but in many ways it's overkill. For instance, if you needed to write a programme involving geometry, you could create an Angle object which would have a value assumed to be in radians and properties for its sine, cosine, tangent and representation in degrees; a Distance object which would have properties for its representation in different measuring units; and assigning a value to any property would affect the object and therefore its other properties. It might be beautiful if you like the OO concept, but it's a bit overkill if you just want to find the missing side of a triangle.
And does a "disposable" programme -- one that you will run only a few times before forgetting it forever -- really need to look pretty anyway?
As for PHP, well, it really isn't much different from Perl -- apart from always needing to put brackets around function parameters, the fact that all variables start with a $ sign whether scalar, array or hash and there is no $_. {I happen to love $_. It goes nicely with the concept of an accumulator. If you never did any assembly language, you probably won't know what I'm talking about, though}. That is hardly surprising, because the original PHP was actually written in Perl to be like a kind of subset of Perl.
Also, one of my little niggles -- and I freely admit that this is just my own opinion -- is the inability to get on with any language that uses the plus sign as the string concatenation operator while letting you freely mix string and numberic variables. {*cough* ruby *cough*} I expect "2" + 2 to equal 4, not 22. Hell, if I have to do something to my variables before I can add them, that just nullified the advantage of having freely-mixable scalar types! It might as well be a strict-typed language and barf on an expression such as "2" + 2!
As for Python - well, it's not my cup of tea {I guess you like either Perl or Python} but other people seem to have written some pretty good stuff in it, so I shan't knock it.
Je fume. Tu fumes. Nous fûmes!
They're currently in the process of porting Quickbasic to MS enabled Phones.
You should know better than to repy to an AC.
However let me chime in also, were I work we just released a web based control system that monitors and controls a large remote vessel for the Navy. The system continuously monitors vessel roll, pitch, ballast levels, mooring tensions, intrusion detection, etc.
This vessel is research platform is unattended for long periods of time. If an alarm condition is encountered the system starts a generator fires up a long haul net connection and sends data and images and dispatches alarm e-mails and phone messages.
I think we can use the term "mission critical" for this application. It is written with Perl and uses Apache sitting on top of Linux.
Oh and by the way we got to do this job because of a similar successful system that monitors and provide critical control for a research submersible.
We have about 15k lines of code libraries that are well written, modular and easy to maintain. Perl's facilities promote packaging your design into small self-contained objects and features like built in (and fast) reg exp, symbolic references, tie, fast (near C like) I/O, etc are fantastic tools that speed development.
"public class HWorld{public static void main(String args[]){System.out.println("Hello world");}}"
.027 seconds
Happy? There's a little more text, but no more programming is required then the C version.
Happy??? What is there to be happy about that? Let's see what you really have there. You have a file that MUST be named HWorld.java. You have an HWorld class. You have the mandatory main function. Then a function call. At the end of the day, it's a whole lot of typing for a "Hello world" program.
In this simple example Perl rocks the socks off of Java.
Let's get a comparison on slow hardware to magnify latencies: celeron 500mhz, 128 megs RAM.
Recent Java (1.4.1_02)
javac compilation of HWorld: 10 seconds
java execution of HWorld: 1 second
size of Hworld.class: 417 bytes
Recent Perl (5.8.2)
perl compilation:
perl compilation & execution: 0.027
size of hworld.pl: 39 bytes
Come again as to what exactly java is better at? It takes more Java to do the same thing in Perl, and no offense, the code you mentioned isn't exactly a joy to read (90% of it is required filler/overhead). Some might call that OVERKILL.
No.
Now there'll be 15 different ways to answer my phone?
Relax...
it's Funny...Ha..Ha..
WTF? Over?
But it would seem like JAVA would be more ideal for cell phones for basic programs, however I am sure we'll see a 1001 nokia address orgainizing scripts here soon.
"The problem with socialism is eventually you run out of other people's money" - Thatcher.
I have tried to confirm this posting at the news section of NOKIA. As far as I could see there is no official news about Perl on NOKIAs phones. Perhaps we have to wait for the recently announced mobile Linux cell phones.
Ok, so Perl is now another language in which you can use to program a cell phone. I'm not knocking Perl but... now what?
- My calls still get cut off.
- "Can you here me now?" is still the most widely spoken phrase among all cell phone conversations.
It seems people's standards of what is considered an acceptable, workable device is slowly deteriorating since musical ring tones, solitaire and programming languages seem to excite consumers of the 21st century more than getting something to function properly.