BBC Creates 'Perl on Rails'

Bogtha writes "Long-time users of Perl for their public websites, and having successfully used Ruby on Rails for internal websites, the BBC have fused the two by creating a 'Perl on Rails' that has the advantages of rapid development that Rails brings, while performing well enough to be used for the Beeb's high-traffic public websites. This is already powering one of their websites, and is set to be used in the controversial iPlayer project as well."

Comments

Re:Thanks a lot Beeb..

[chromatic]

But since I have you on the line, so to speak, are you in fact asserting that Perl is like natural languages?

Yes, to some degree. The primary goal of Perl, like other programming languages, is to communicate with other programmers. There appear to be two schools of thought on how to do this. One of them comes from the mathematicians, who appreciate simplicity and uniformity of expression (as least per their on definitions of both) as a primary design criterion. The other comes from the linguists, who (in my opinion) have somewhat better ideas of how people (not just mathematicians) really communicate.

I'm not saying that one is bad and the other is good. You'd never likely get the Turing model or the lambda calculus out of a linguist, for example, and COBOL and AppleScript aren't great examples of applying linguistic principles to language design either -- so there's a balance to strike between them.

I'm not sure either linguistics or computer-language development is well served by this comparison.

I agree to some degree, but just because no one has ever done it perfectly doesn't mean it's not worth doing.

On a day-to-day basis, does it actually guide your choices about the language?

Yes, actually. Remember that Perl is an artificial language, so it can simultaneously be more and less a pastiche than English. Consistency and syntactical similarity of semantics are important in natural language (avoid false cognates) but even more so in a programming language. The Perl 6 designers believe strongly that similar things should look similar and dissimilar things should look dissimilar. As well, concepts such as noun markers and subject-verb agreement (context) are present in Perl, as well as pronouns (topicalization). This brings up other problems such as ambiguous antecedents.

The designers evaluate new operators and concepts in terms quite heavily. Mnemonics are important, as well as the proper length of identifiers and semantics of their names. For example, Perl 6 uses say instead of println because we believe it will be a frequent operation -- more frequent than print and as such deserves a shorter identifier. Whatever the syntax for accessing the current continuation will be, it's likely to be somewhat longer, as it's not something we want people to need to use more than a few times.