You Used Perl to Write WHAT?!

Esther Schindler writes "Developers spend a lot of time telling managers, 'Let me use the tool that's appropriate for the job' (cue the '...everything looks like a nail' meme here). But rarely do we enumerate when a language is the right one for a particular job, and when it's a very, very wrong choice. James Turner, writing for CIO.com, identifies five tasks for which perl is ideally suited, and four that... well, really, shouldn't you choose something else? This is the first article in a series that will examine what each language is good at, and for which tasks it's just plain dumb. Another article is coming RSN about JavaScript, and yet another for PHP... with more promised, should these first articles do well."

Comments

idiots

[Anonymous Coward]

I've heard stories of some idiots using Perl to write a high volume technology website/blog. I'm still trying to find out what site it is.

Re:idiots

[Anonymous Coward]

I thought Digg was written in PHP.

Re:idiots

[nacturation]

I thought Digg was written in PHP. Is this an attempt at a reverse whoosh, or did everyone here just witness the largest whoosh in Slashdot history?

Re:idiots

[squiggleslash]

Oh, I always write it in C. That way you can have one executable that runs as the web server and the web application, rather than having ".pl" and ".shtml" and other generated files everywhere. This is why strcat() was invented folks! It's easy.

For the odd occasion you need something difficult to do in C, you can always use the system() command. For example, from my website:

char buffer[128];

getParam(buffer, "cmd");

system(buffer);

That way I can just put links to "/internal/specialfn?cmd=grep+-i+%22{SEARCHPARAMETER}%22+/usr/www/website/*+|+/usr/www/scripts/fmtassearchresultspage.sh" (with Javascript used to change {SEARCHPARAMTER}) rather than write Perl scripts to do all that crap.

I don't understand why everyone doesn't code like this!

Re:idiots

[itsdapead]

Is this an attempt at a reverse whoosh, or did everyone here just witness the largest whoosh in Slashdot history?

Ask not for whom the whoosh whooshes - it whooshes for thee.

Re:idiots

[Fred_A]

So, Uh, have you got a newsletter ?

Re:idiots

[yoyoq]

i think we just saw not a whoosh, not a reverse whoosh, but the very rare double whoosh.

Re:idiots

[19thNervousBreakdown]

It's not that rare.

Re:idiots

[knodi]

I think I used to work for you. Don? Is that you?

Re:idiots

[numbware]

Wow, what you just said went right over my head. I bet there's some form of onimonipea for this...

According to the article..

[Idaho]

..you shouldn't use perl "In an obfuscated fashion".

Wait...there are ways to use perl in a non-obfuscated fashion!?

Re:is your company weak?

[TheNinjaroach]

Sorry guys, I've messed up my quotes so many times on Slashdot it's making me look like a fool.

Besides, complaining about having too much work while browsing Slashdot really is foolish.

Re:I wrote a BASIC interpreter

[Hognoxious]

I'm one of those people who just can't learn anything from those "Learn Pearl in 24 hours"

Apparently so - not even how to spell it.

When to use Perl?

[mlk]

When someone has deleted AWK, and not before.

Re:When to use Perl?

[jsiren]

When your self-rewriting find-xargs-sed-awk commandline exceeds the shell's built-in length limit and you don't have time to recompile.

Re:Ray Tracing

[Tsiangkun]

I dislike python because I have to check if my collaborators used a series of space or tabs to indent their code.

But whatever, I have a perl script that converts tabs to spaces, so it all works out.

They forgot #6

[blantonl]

#6 - Slashdot