Slashdot Mirror
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.
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...
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 @.
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.
Now if only Siemens ported Python, that would be cool.
"We are unable to complete your call. Please hang up and try the -w option."
Big question - does it have an SSH client?
What? For the Nokia Series 60 platform? Yes!
I SSH into my workplace UNIX box from my Nokia 3650 moderately regularly. The SSH client for SymbainOS is a port of PuTTY and can be found here.
Al.The Daily ACK - Eclectic posts by yet another hacker
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.
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.
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!