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Where's the "IronPerl" Project?
pondlife writes "A friend asked me today about using some Microsoft server components from Perl. Over the years he's built up a large collection of Perl/COM code using Win32::OLE and he had planned on doing the same thing here. The big problem is that as with many current MS APIs, they're available for .NET only because COM is effectively deprecated at this point. I did some Googling, expecting to find quickly the Perl equivalent of IronPython or IronRuby. But to my surprise I found almost nothing. ActiveState has PerlNET, but there's almost no information about it, and the mailing list 'activity' suggests it's dead or dying anyway. So, what are Perl/Windows shops doing now that more and more Microsoft components are .NET? Are people moving to other languages for Windows administration? Are they writing wrappers using COM interop? Or have I completely missed something out there that solves this problem?"
here goes nothing Programming Perl in Dot Net
Microsoft was shipping Perl interpreters for Windows at least as far back as the Windows NT 4 Resource Kits (like 1998?). There is a long history of Perl on Windows.
A main reason is that Perl 6, which has been in development for nearly as long as .NET, was supposed to be a VM itself. In effect, it was a competitor to .NET.
Way back when IronPython and IronRuby were starting, Perl 6 looked like it was Nearly Here, so no one thought porting Perl 5 to run on .NET was worth it. Since Perl 6 still hasn't materialized, guess it was a bad choice...
Perl is an antique language. You should look at a modern scripting language. Powershell is much more powerful as it pipes .net objects instead of text.
When I was young, I had to rub sticks together to compute.
PerlMonks is the right place to ask this question, IMO. You'll be posing the question to a lot of very experienced Perl users who might have similar experiences to yours, or good advice on what to do next. The PM community is friendly and very helpful as well.
Yeah Python developers tend to like Boo, which is very Python-inspired.
The CIL part of the CLI is stack-based, and is more of a "theoretically generic" intermediary language, and works for almost any purpose.
The CTS (Common Type System) does have some limits (no multiple inheritance except multiple interface inheritance). Your language implementation only has to play nice with the CTS if you want it to interoperate with other languages on the CLI. (Normally you can write an app in a whole bunch of languages and the metadata is exposed to the others - so you might choose to use C# for your core services, C++/CLI for interop work, and something like Python/Boo for your business layer).
I think the Eiffel implementation ditches the CTS, or extends it. That has its ups and downsides (mainly down imo).
3laws: No freebies, no backsies, GTFO.
The figures on this simply don't support that claim. Your anecdotal evidence of two places you worked it meaningless.
If anything I'd say this is because many people consider Perl's time to have passed and no longer see a reason to use it in any significant project.
Funny.. I'd like to see the figures behind your claims that "many people consider Perl's time to have passed".
A quote from CIO.com story entitled "PHP, JavaScript, Ruby, Perl, Python, and Tcl Today: The State of the Scripting Universe" (8/29/08)
"Of all the scripting languages, Perl offers the biggest installed base of applications, of code, of integrated systems, of skilled programmers. It has the lowest defect rate of any open-source software product. It is ported to essentially every hardware architecture and operating systems, from embedded control systems to mainframes. It is optimized for speed, for memory footprint, for programmer productivity. It has readily-accessible libraries for all types of programming tasks: Web application development, systems and network integration and management, end-user application development, middleware programming, REST and service-oriented architecture programming. Perl is ideal for the organization that takes charge of its own IT future."
Other interesting stats and info throughout the story..
full article
-Lod
You probably should have had a look at Strawberry Perl.
Most of the Perl technocrati abandoned ActivePerl for it over the last year, because all the CPAN modules Just Work.
(Full Disclosure: I made Strawberry) :)
To be fair, that quote is by Richard Dice, the president of the Perl Foundation, so he might be a little biased. :-)
On the other hand, Perl still gets many more job postings on dice.com than any other interpreted language, including PHP: http://www.presicient.com/langjobs.html
*sigh*, Python is a lot of things, but it is NOT well defined. Maybe Python is OK compared to the other open source source scripting languages like Perl and Ruby. C is a well defined language (except for the bits that are explicitly left undefined), Pascal is really well defined, and Lua is pretty damn good.
I expect that Perl is left out because a lot of its strengths are in Unix scripting, database libraries, bioinformatics applications and other goodies, which rely on C code and a Unix platform. Ruby Gems and *cough* easy_install just aren't the treasure troves of CPAN, and CPAN can't be easily ported to .net.
No, a Perl lover will jump in and say Perl is FAST to write. Its so easy to do so many things. I'm not talking large systems here, I'm talking things you need to do day to day.
I've yet to find another language where I can process a text file 100 different ways with just a few lines. I really don't give a damn if anyone else can read or maintain my short scripts. There for me.
One should not theorize before one has data. -Sherlock Holmes-