You, sir, are an idiot.
One of the real strengths of Perl is in its adaptability to generic programming techniques. These make code highly reusable, and customizable. My experience has strongly been that any use of inheritence from anything other than an abstract base class or an interface tends to cause maintainability problems. It is unfortunate that this technique is very pervasive throughout Java.
Every piece of java code around here is full of casts... can't get anything out of a vector without casting it. Was it supposed to be a type safe language? What kind of enforcement is going on there? Ah... I see... 1990 style OOP is the only thing they support... no modern programming techniques. (alright, a bit of an exageration... but not much.)
Readability is among the strongest features of Perl; it has much more flexibility in the specification of commands than most other languages. This flexibility gives you significantly more control over how to express intent. Obviously any sort of freedom is a double edged sword; but the freedom to do things well vs. a consistent mdeiocrity... I'll take the freedom.
Maintainability is 100% a matter of design. Any 'well' designed project is going to be maintainable; any 'poorly' designed project is not.
COBOL and VB popular? (What rock do you live under? Just want to know so I can avoid it.) I have found both to be total maintenance nightmares (especially VB, for some reason there seems to be an abundance of poorly written VB is the world.)
I'd list the three big strengths of perl as:
1. Its quick to develop in
2. Its easy to maintain
3. Potentially a high level of code reusability
4. Acceptably fast
------------- [4] Dick Hardt's role for perl6 will be to talk to customers with a significant interest in Perl's stability and growth (e.g. Yahoo investment banks, etc.) and forward these concerns to the perl6 community.
"Investment banks" is a giveaway. It's so amazingly well contrived, it almost makes you forget that Perl doesn't have customers, it has users. Do you see a mention of the Perl user groups there? Does this sound like Larry with a concern for the community?
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Working for a major wall street firm, perl is widely used by us, and generally in ways that potentially have a large financial impact (like running a trading book.) When a lot of money is on the line, you can bet people get really interested in the stability of a product (even one you didn't "pay" for; this is wall street after all, what you save in costs ends up as more profits, and that has a direct impact on your annual comp.) At least this part of that article seems reasonable to me...
(Investment banking is kind of a misnomer, in that it represents only a portion of what a global financial services firm does - which also includes broker/dealer activities, proprietary trading, investment management, and various more traditional banking services as well.)
I grabbed a copy of this when it came out... its pretty easy reading. We use mainly Sybase here, with a smattering of DB2 and Oracle, so keeping things consistent between databases is a really nice feature; and this book has a good section about the differences in DBI between the different databases (which is what makes it worth the money.) If you aren't familiar with DBI, but are familiar with databases in general this book is a great companion to use in doing a migration. Its well written and organized; and works well as a reference manual where you just want to look upo the one paragraph that tells you what to do. (sure its got the standard I am a tutorial stuff, but who wants to read all that?) Summary: - easily accessible to any level perl programmer - well organized, good index - very useful as a reference - great chapter on the DBI spec itself for those of us who hate reading pod when we don't have too
I think you got things backward. The government is not out to serve you; even nominally. At a minimum a government is out to protect you from external threats (i.e. threats not involving you). The government in the US, and to a greater extent the rest of the world, has evolved into also trying to redistribute wealth to part of the people (at the expense of the rest.) Not a real service. They don't have to be nice; its not like you can just stop paying taxes. Your individual opinion is not important; any service of the government is just as a means of taking from a portion of the people to appease other people. They are rude to you... well... whatcha going to do? On the other hand, companies need to provide a *service* or *product*, in return for which they are compensated. The value of the transaction is mutually agreed upon; you don't like it... you walk away. They are rude to you they don't get your business... they lose money. The corporation is out to do business, and that makes the customers the primary concern; and makes everyone potentially a customer. They are nice to you becuase it is in their best interest.
I disagree... people always should have responsibility and freedom to make a decision about whom to deal with. This goes whether you are hiring someone, or whether you are providing a service or good someone is paying for. If you are a , and want to patronize only business that should be your choice. If you are a employer, and wish to hire employees that again should be your choice. There is a certain freedom that each side should have. Arbitrarily limiting the freedom of half the people in the country, so that the other half can do whatever they feel like without any recriminations is not a self-consistent philosohpy. People have both a right and a responsibility to make judgements about what is right and wrong. I don't necessarily ask you to agree with me, but I get really upset when you start making my moral decisions for me. If you are a cocain addict, and a good salesman, I should have the right/freedom to hire you or not based on that data. Maybe your skills outway my judgement on your lifestyle... you get hired. Maybe if I have moral problems with the way you live your life... I choose not to hire you. If you have moral problems with the way I live my life, maybe you don't work for me. or visa versa.
I think people are missing an essential difference between corporations and governments... people have an individual choice to patronize corporations, and to work for corporations. If they find the infringement on their privacy to be too much, they can choose to walk away. This is not the case with governments where the best you can hope for is that you can convince a lot of other people to agree with you, and maybe pass or repeal a law.
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You, sir, are an idiot. One of the real strengths of Perl is in its adaptability to generic programming techniques. These make code highly reusable, and customizable. My experience has strongly been that any use of inheritence from anything other than an abstract base class or an interface tends to cause maintainability problems. It is unfortunate that this technique is very pervasive throughout Java. Every piece of java code around here is full of casts... can't get anything out of a vector without casting it. Was it supposed to be a type safe language? What kind of enforcement is going on there? Ah... I see... 1990 style OOP is the only thing they support... no modern programming techniques. (alright, a bit of an exageration... but not much.) Readability is among the strongest features of Perl; it has much more flexibility in the specification of commands than most other languages. This flexibility gives you significantly more control over how to express intent. Obviously any sort of freedom is a double edged sword; but the freedom to do things well vs. a consistent mdeiocrity... I'll take the freedom. Maintainability is 100% a matter of design. Any 'well' designed project is going to be maintainable; any 'poorly' designed project is not. COBOL and VB popular? (What rock do you live under? Just want to know so I can avoid it.) I have found both to be total maintenance nightmares (especially VB, for some reason there seems to be an abundance of poorly written VB is the world.) I'd list the three big strengths of perl as: 1. Its quick to develop in 2. Its easy to maintain 3. Potentially a high level of code reusability 4. Acceptably fast
From the article:
-------------
[4] Dick Hardt's role for perl6 will be to talk to customers with a significant interest in Perl's stability and growth (e.g. Yahoo investment banks, etc.) and forward these concerns to the perl6 community.
"Investment banks" is a giveaway. It's so amazingly well contrived, it almost makes you forget that Perl doesn't have customers, it has users. Do you see a mention of the Perl user groups there? Does this sound like Larry with a concern for the community?
--------------------------------
Working for a major wall street firm, perl is widely used by us, and generally in ways that potentially have a large financial impact (like running a trading book.) When a lot of money is on the line, you can bet people get really interested in the stability of a product (even one you didn't "pay" for; this is wall street after all, what you save in costs ends up as more profits, and that has a direct impact on your annual comp.) At least this part of that article seems reasonable to me...
(Investment banking is kind of a misnomer, in that it represents only a portion of what a global financial services firm does - which also includes broker/dealer activities, proprietary trading, investment management, and various more traditional banking services as well.)
I grabbed a copy of this when it came out... its pretty easy reading. We use mainly Sybase here, with a smattering of DB2 and Oracle, so keeping things consistent between databases is a really nice feature; and this book has a good section about the differences in DBI between the different databases (which is what makes it worth the money.) If you aren't familiar with DBI, but are familiar with databases in general this book is a great companion to use in doing a migration. Its well written and organized; and works well as a reference manual where you just want to look upo the one paragraph that tells you what to do. (sure its got the standard I am a tutorial stuff, but who wants to read all that?) Summary: - easily accessible to any level perl programmer - well organized, good index - very useful as a reference - great chapter on the DBI spec itself for those of us who hate reading pod when we don't have too
I think you got things backward. The government is not out to serve you; even nominally. At a minimum a government is out to protect you from external threats (i.e. threats not involving you). The government in the US, and to a greater extent the rest of the world, has evolved into also trying to redistribute wealth to part of the people (at the expense of the rest.) Not a real service. They don't have to be nice; its not like you can just stop paying taxes. Your individual opinion is not important; any service of the government is just as a means of taking from a portion of the people to appease other people. They are rude to you... well... whatcha going to do? On the other hand, companies need to provide a *service* or *product*, in return for which they are compensated. The value of the transaction is mutually agreed upon; you don't like it... you walk away. They are rude to you they don't get your business... they lose money. The corporation is out to do business, and that makes the customers the primary concern; and makes everyone potentially a customer. They are nice to you becuase it is in their best interest.
I disagree... people always should have responsibility and freedom to make a decision about whom to deal with. This goes whether you are hiring someone, or whether you are providing a service or good someone is paying for. If you are a , and want to patronize only business that should be your choice. If you are a employer, and wish to hire employees that again should be your choice. There is a certain freedom that each side should have. Arbitrarily limiting the freedom of half the people in the country, so that the other half can do whatever they feel like without any recriminations is not a self-consistent philosohpy. People have both a right and a responsibility to make judgements about what is right and wrong. I don't necessarily ask you to agree with me, but I get really upset when you start making my moral decisions for me. If you are a cocain addict, and a good salesman, I should have the right/freedom to hire you or not based on that data. Maybe your skills outway my judgement on your lifestyle... you get hired. Maybe if I have moral problems with the way you live your life... I choose not to hire you. If you have moral problems with the way I live my life, maybe you don't work for me. or visa versa.
I think people are missing an essential difference between corporations and governments... people have an individual choice to patronize corporations, and to work for corporations. If they find the infringement on their privacy to be too much, they can choose to walk away. This is not the case with governments where the best you can hope for is that you can convince a lot of other people to agree with you, and maybe pass or repeal a law.