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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?"
No... people are just moving away from Windows for ANY administration, or anything of real value.
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. Perl is a typical example of a jack of all trades, master of none. These days with so many well-designed languages to choose from it's a great deal easier and more productive to learn several languages that each do one paradigm well and use them as applicable instead of trying to get by using just Perl.
I wouldn't say everyone is moving away from Windows, my last job was very Microsoft centered. Windows workstations everywhere, Exchange server, IIS servers, Microsoft SQL, Active Directory, all that bullshit.
But, I do think anyone using Windows is very unlikely to use Perl; they just seem diametrically opposed. One being used for Unix administration since large systems were in their infancy, and the other one being a the-suits-picked-it decision. At least in my (very biased) opinion.
Based on what I gather in my country the use of Perl is actually in decline, while Python's is growing. Then there's Ruby that's also popular (not sure if it proves to be stable as Python's growth though).
This does confirm, at least for me, why IronPython and IronRuby happened, but why IronPerl is nowhere in sight. Of course, YMMV in your country, but I think it is a global trend to be honest.
Jeroen Ruigrok/Asmodai
It turns out that code written is Perl is actually unmaintainable garbage. Sure, it works. But it really is a write-only language. Most businesses (which is what MS is catering to) care about structured code that can be maintained, not just stuff you banged out to get the job done.
Now a Perl lover will jump in and say that you can write Perl so that it's maintainable, and you can write Python or Ruby so that it's unreadable. It's true, but both are hard to do. Businesses are looking to idiot-proof as much as possible, since most of their developers are probably idiots. Hence the love for VB and Java. I can't imagine anyone commissioning a software project to seriously consider Perl, especially on windows.
I guess it's because most of the perl guys were Unix guys?
At any rate perl doesn't really fit into the .NET "OOP" paradigm. It has objects, but with such flexibility that every time I wanted to create an object in perl I have to look up the bless() function. Most people use it to write small, fast scripts (Activeperl on Windows takes care of that) and there aren't many medium to large scale projects (which .NET arguably does well) that use perl.
Don't quote me on this.
I suspect people are moving to Powershell, since it's a good shell scripting language, and it's easy to load .NET assemblies among other things.
I was able to learn enough powershell to do some rather useful things in a few days, and that's without having a strong shell scripting background.
I know... Python and Ruby and Java are the hot languages, and you think Perl is going the way of COBOL. Well f*ck it - I like perl. And, there are some great reasons to use it:
.NET. So, I guess we have to stick with the Win32 CPAN modules you already know about.
1. I already know it. I learned it before Ruby was "cool".
2. It's already installed on every Linux and BSD machine. Yes, that means I can run my script on your brand new Ubuntu desktop, or your 1998 BSD server. And it'll work.
3. Great Regex support (am not saying your language de-jour doesn't, just that perl does)
4. CPAN is one of the most extensive software libraries known to mankind.
5. It really doesn't matter if you use it or not - perl is here for the long haul. Too many linux utilities depend on it. My linux box doesn't have ruby or python installed, and I haven't had any problems. Try deleting perl from yours!
So, if you are like me, you already know Perl. Maybe you don't use windows at home, but you have to use it at work. I suggest you download Strawberry Perl (or go all-out with cygwin).
Unfortunately, there does not seem to be great support for perl with
But maybe, just maybe, someone will come along one day... and viola! Perl.NET!
Until that day comes, I will continue to use perl anyway, and all of you Haters out there can go $@_{s/;//g}!
- Demosthenes
cynicsreport.com
Why would you want to rewrite to use .NET, I mean c'mon Perl programmers are known for their objectivity and pragmatism. Rewrite in .NET before you *have* to, forget it!
There's 2 things to consider before you go changing your code:
1. COM may be 'oh, that old thing we no longer talk about' to Microsoft, but it isn't going away anytime soon, no matter what their marketing department tells you. There's a fair bit of code written that uses it.
2. One of those codebases that is heavily reliant on COM (and Win32) is this .NET thing, a lot of the class library is a wrapper around the old libraries. So even if you did rewrite your code, all you'd be doing is calling your old libraries through a intermediate layer!
Sure MS doesn't want to do IronPerl, I think that's because python and Ruby are 'cool' languages, and MS is trying to be like someone's Dad, 'getting hip with the kids'. I doubt it'll ever create an IronPerl simply because there's no mileage in it for them to entice the Perl developers over to Windows unlike the Python and Ruby folks that they're scared of losing to other platforms.
Well, apparently, nobody in the Perl community cared enough about it to create it. Do you care enough to start such a project.
I suspect most people probably thought it was easier to switch to a different language that did support the environment they needed. I know I did.
Opinionated post follows, feel free to ignore or disagree....
Perl is the original language that taught a whole generation of programmers that you don't have to write 1000s of lines to do a simple thing. I love its expressiveness, its design philosophy (There's More Than One Way To Do It) and its linguistic roots. Despite being known for write-only shit, actually writing clean, maintainable code in perl is a pure pleasure. It just gives you the extra bit of latitude in your coding, that what you write can express not just what you want done, but a little extra bit of how you think of it... by using "unless" instead of "if" at times, putting the conditionals after the statement at others, you can actually make the code read like the main points are main points, adn the accessory checks are accessory. I love that flexibility.
For years, perl was the secret productivity tool of many. What others would spend weeks writing in C++ or java whatever, a perl coder would prototype in a day or two, and often the result was good enough to be declared final. And with the amazing collaboration experiment called CPAN, there was a good chance you would find a module to do the heavly lifting for you, and the two days could be shortened to a couple hours.
Sadly, the perl development community missed not one, but two boats.
First, it missed the second wave of web programming. Perl was virtually synonymous with CGI programming, but then the web world moved on to embedding code inside the HTML, which is a rather crappy combination but is easy to start with. So the perl guys produce mod_perl and about a thousand templating kits, which all together made mod_perl a powerful, scalable, flexible web platform that was at the same time confusing, hard to learn, and unfriendly towards shared hosts. And then PHP came to fulfil that need, with their bastardized watered down clone of the language, and basically stole the show.
Second, the perl community in all their wisdom, back in 2000, decided that the whole language needed to be redesigned from scratch, and built on a new generic virtual machine for dynamic languages, which would run not only perl6 but also python, tcl, logo, and who knows what else. They embarked on a prolonged process of design by committee, which 8 years later has just managed to produce a variety of incomplete specifications, and two incomplete prototypes of the language interpreter, with no completion date nor any backwards compatibility to be seen. In the meantime, the whole .NET framework has been created and gone through several iterations, Ruby has risen from obscurity to fame, etc. For all we know, perl6 may still one day reach completion, and be a useful language. The design specs are way cool, and the people implementing it sound like they are having fun.
So what happens with perl and .NET? Well, not much. Apparently ActiveState have at some point developped a bridge of some kind, but I can't find it in CPAN. There's Inline::Java, but no Inline::CSharp. Maybe no-one cares enough. It's true that the target demographics for perl and .NET are quite separate, but that should not be a reason for the language that pioneered interfacing with everything on earth.
The hell they do.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
and then join them all together ... using perl.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Actually the problem is that "only Perl (the executable) can parse Perl (the language)". There isn't any formal description of the current language implementation, that effectively renders near to impossible to parse and execute Perl code outside of the perl binary; some edge cases of the syntax particularly are only determined at runtime (instead of compile time).
Perl 6 is among other things an answer to this limitation, because it's thoroughly spec'd in the "synopses", and is actually currently implemented in two different ways (Parrot VM written in C, and Pugs written in Haskell). So it's perfectly possible to make IronPerl6, but no IronPerl.
The full quote being:
"Jack of all trades, master of none, though ofttimes better than master of one." ref
Although I get what you mean. The trouble is that the thing I love about Perl - its expressiveness - is also its biggest weakness. In the hands of an inexperienced programmer Perl can be a nightmare. But in the hands of a master, a Perl solution to a problem can be brief and beautiful
Global symbol "$deity" requires explicit package name at line 2. - If only $scripture started "use strict;"
You've never had a development schedule written by a business person, have you?
Oh, do all the usual Slashdot Perl-bashing moves if you want ...
Perl is a big chunk of Unix sanity which you can bring with you to Windows,
and use for Unix-y tasks. Same reasons as for installing Cygwin.
I often use perl as a normal command-line tool, when grep and awk aren't good enough.
But I admit that a Perl/Windows shop sounds odd.