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

Madness, I say

[Anne Thwacks]

I am going to create "PHP off the Rails" for developers of PHP websites. PHP developers will need no training, as most of them are off the rails already!

Re:Madness, I say

[Just Some Guy]

Sounds like a bunch of Perl coders who cant be bothered to learn another platform trying to keep themselves in jobs.

Sounds to me like a bunch of Perl coders with a few million lines of corporate code who thought this would be easier than learning another language for one specific smallish project.

Re:Madness, I say

[Just Some Guy]

They're talking about having tens of thousands of files in a directory, and having an archive of data on all shows the BBC is showing, but no mention of using anything other than flat files!

Flat files that are pre-generated from a database backend, maybe. As in a cron job each night that does something like "for show in db.select(shows): generatestaticpage(show)". I'd be amazed if the whole site was just one big Dreamweaver folder that gets published.

I really can't imagine what their circumstances would have to be for it to be a sane option to rewrite Ruby on Rails in Perl.

"We have a database engine. We have a template system. We have a language that everyone in-house knows. Let's write a generalized method for combining the three!"

I suspect that happens a lot more often than you'd think. If anything, I consider it a testament to the BBC that they've decided to release their code so that everyone else doesn't have to reinvent it.

Disclaimer: I much prefer Python, and to me the BBC is that extra channel that has "Coupling" and "Ramsay's Kitchen Nightmares". I have no special love for Perl or the BBC. I just think that it's pretty cool of them to do this and wish them luck.

Nice sig, BTW. :-)

Super

[brunes69]

So... is this trying to combine the slowness and unscaleability of Ruby on Rails with the unreadability of Perl?

Conspiracy!

[__aaclcg7560]

This is proof that there is a conspiracy to make up absurd programming shenanigans to sell overpriced door stoppers! Coming soon...

"Perl on Rails for Dummies"

"Perl on Rails for Idiots"

"Perl on Rails Bible"

"Perl on Rails in 24 Hours"

"Perl on Rails in a Nutshell"

"Perl on Rails: The Missing Manual"

...at a bookstore near you to burn a hole in your wallet!

Re:Conspiracy!

[Anonymous Coward]

Not if you are a Comcast subscriber.

Don't get your hopes up

[Anonymous Coward]

This'll be UK-only; probably licensed under the BBCPL, which is like the GPL, but only for people in England, Scotland, Wales, and N. Ireland.

Re:Holy Crap

[Anonymous Coward]

Strange it may be, but incomprehensible and a run-on it's not.

"Long-time users of Perl for their public websites," - an appositive
"and having successfully used Ruby on Rails for internal websites," - another appositive, successfully connected with a conjunction
"the BBC" - the subject of the sentence (which the appositives are in apposition to)
"have fused the two by creating a 'Perl on Rails'" - a perfectly fine predicate
"that has the advantages of rapid development that Rails brings," - with a relative clause
"while performing well enough to be used for the Beeb's high-traffic public websites." - and another modifying clause.

In short: it's a sentence. It's grammatical. It's comprehensible. Quit whining.

Re:Holy Crap

[Cheesey]

Its almost incomprehensible by normal, english-speaking humans.

Yes, but add a few $'s and %'s in the right places, and it turns into a one-line cross-platform implementation of iPlayer written in Perl. (If your Perl code can be understood by humans without extreme effort, you're just not trying.)

Surely the BBC of all organizations...

[goombah99]

Should have preferred Python or Parrot. I mean c'mon. nudge nudge know what I mean... She's a goer.

Re:Holy Crap

[pdbaby]

I don't see the problem...

understand it easily if longtime perl programmer($self);

But what is Rails standing on?

[Phroon]

At the end of the lecture, a little old lady at the back of the room got up and said: "What you have told us is rubbish. Web development is really Ruby supported on the back of Rails."

The developer gave a superior smile before replying, "What is Rails standing on?"

"You're very clever, young man, very clever," said the old lady. "But it's Rails all the way down!"

Re:Holy Crap

[Cairnarvon]

If it was meant to be easy to understand, we wouldn't have called it "code".

Re:Wow. A consultants dream

[jhoger]

Perl is readable to those that know Perl. I know Perl and I find idiomatic Perl readable.

And "job security" language choices is just as much a problem with regular employees as consultants. As a consultant there's been more then one occasion where I had to go and clean up the mess after some bored employee made an "interesting" language or framework choice presumably to keep themselves interested.

-- John.

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.