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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?"
Perl/Windows shops? WTF?
That's like buying an extremely overpowered, difficult to setup and impossible to maintain turbo for your Yugo.
I _love_ perl. It's so simple, anyone can use it. In fact, the other day I found my 1½ yYO in front of the computer, and she had written a fully working email reader in perl. Truely amazing.
SIG: TAKE OFF EVERY 'CAPTAIN'!!
here goes nothing Programming Perl in Dot Net
From my cold, dead hands!
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.
Some people aren't happy until they have the worst of all worlds.
"Because I can".
Deleted
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
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...
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.
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.
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
Unfortunately, (as perl fan), Perl6 is the problem. All the bright young things went into the death march that is Perl6 and CPAN stopped getting useful additions. Two burnout cycles later, we still don't have Perl6. Or modern, complete XML/Xpath support. Or a DBI::CSV which can do joins. Or any other number of actually useful code bits.
I'm now tossing up whether to learn Ruby or Python.
Your theory appears to be that Windows is a good web platform, because on netcraft, 2 out of the top 50 sites by uptime are running Windows. Wouldn't the goodness of a web platform depend on a whole bunch of things, only one of which would be uptime? And uptime would be less important than things like availability and ease of installing software. And most importantly, whether the machine has a blue or green LED for the power light. Obviously machines with blue power LEDs suck, but machines with green LEDs rock! And Windows web servers always have blue LEDs for power lights! Windows sucks and always will. They don't even know how to write drivers for green LEDs.
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.
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
I have been in similar shoes some time ago.
I wouldn't elaborate on the all boring details, but just shortly summarize my experience.
If you can Perl, then you better off porting your stuff to Linux. Perl on Windows sounds cool and ActiveState does excellent job. But Perl would always remain underdog, restrained by the fact that its foreign platform - platform where VB rules.
I know I sound impractical, but after two years trying to make some stuff fly reliably on Windows with CygWin and ActiveState, I simply given up. I given up on Windows mostly because I found that all stuff I need, on Linux is very similar and (most importantly) there are no all those stupid CygWin and OLE/ActiveX annoyances and periodic breakages. For my application, near doubled performances was only an extra bonus.
If you plan to remain on Windows, you have to accept and start doing it in VB or C# or whatever is language du jour in Redmond.
If you depend on Perl, then thinking in direction of *nix platform is sound choice. (Or even some VMware or VBox setup with Linux guest.)
P.S. My work was related to processing of .xls files with huge amount of statistical data and making some charts for them. On Linux that was solved beautifully with (1) telling people to export info as CSV (extra bonus: smaller files) and (2) gnuplot output charts to PDF. Frankly, in the end it worked magnitudes better than the setup with ActiveState Perl/Excel/WinWord/etc on Windows.
All hope abandon ye who enter here.
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."
Dude, in which world is COM deprecated ? Effectively most of Windows system programming ( plug-ins, filters, extensions yada yada, especially the parts that concern shell, explorer or IE extensions ) are all exposed through COM intefacts still. In some cases we still have simple C interfaces like for device drivers, and a lot of security or crypto related stuff. So WDYM deprecated ?
http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.slashdot.org Errors found while checking this document as HTML5!
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.
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
And the best part....
Almost all MCSE holders are afraid of it so they cant hire low wage cert's to maintain and change it.
I love perl in the windows world it allows us with skills to have yet another noose around the neck of management.
VB.NET was our first noose for management. I was so glad when Microsoft made VB hard. Almost all the part time VB programmers in the office instantly were ineffective as they could not wrap their heads around OO programming.
Problem is, there are still millions of VB6 applications in use today in corporations all over america... and one day micrsoft will do something to break every one of them.
That makes me smile.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
As a former heavy user of Perl (and now a light user), let me encourage you that you're unlikely to go wrong either way. Both are popular, well-supported dynamic languages with bright futures.
Python is less Perlish than Ruby in syntax, but in the end I found that rather charming and made it my "new" dynamic language. I have no regrets.
Besides, if I want to shred and rebuild a text file in 40 characters of line noise (please understand that I mean that fondly - I like Perl's conciseness), then I've still got Perl 5. Python does many other things well, so I consider them both useful tools to know.
So quit tossing up (ahem), pick one, and get on with it! :-)
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;"
I'm still using most of the Perl applications -- on *three different OSs* -- that I wrote before .NET existed, and I expect I'll be using them (on at least three different OSs) long after .NET has been replaced by Monoposoft's next attempt at World Domination[TM].
Rich And Stupid is not so bad as Working For Rich And Stupid.
First, as other people have mentioned, Perl use is declining. I love Perl, but it's just not as popular as it used to be.
Second, Perl has always been more popular on, and worked better with, UNIX. That's even more true now that fewer people are using it. Ask 100 Perl developers whether they prefer UNIX or Windows, and 99 of them will say UNIX. So it's not too surprising there's no Windows only rewrite of it.
As for Perl/Windows shops, do they even exist? Seems to me that if there were enough pressure to heavily use Perl, there'd be enough pressure to use something other than Windows.
Maybe not
...and in the darkness bind them
There, I fixed that for you.
This issue is a bit more complicated than you think.
You've never had a development schedule written by a business person, have you?
The Iron* family of languages are re-implementations from scratch of a language to run on top of .NET. This approach requires a large time investment to get it working as reimplementing a language and then tuning it to run fast is not a weekend hack.
There is another option, to build bridges from a language to .NET. This is possible because .NET can be used as a library, Perl can host .NET and then create objects and send messages to objects living in the .NET world.
For a language in continuous evolution like Perl, following the Iron* route is more difficult, and the second approach might be better.
I believe there used to be a set of .NET bindings for Perl.
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-
Just please don't make the argument Python is inherently more readable.
It's not
http://algebraicthunk.net/~dburrows/blog/entry/attachments/debsudoku.py
http://www.blott-online.com/sudoku/sudoku-solver
Main difference between the BSD license and the GPL license: one is from California and the other is from Massachusetts