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Re: PERL, PDF and religious wars was Re: [LUG] Development (this might be long!)

 

On Mon, 21 Mar 2005 19:00:04 +0000, Simon Waters
<simon@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
PERL I find really hard to write, it lacks all user defined structures
I'm use to using in programming languages (even C), and tries to replace
them with about 3 structures, and a lot of hope and indirection, which
tends to end up looking like a bunch of brackets, ">" and "$" signs.

Ok. First of its Perl. Anyone calling it PERL has been reading to many
bad 1995 matt wright books.

Also it doesn't lack data structures - it supports entirely arbitary
data structures, classes and class,package,object and other scoped
data. There is no hope involved unless you haven't read even the most
trivial documentation and are copy & pasting what you found on usenet.

Also the sigils clarify things a great deal. They take some getting
used to but the reward is huge.

On the other hand some of the little utilities I'm happiest with are
written in PERL, because it has CPAN, and the C in CPAN really does mean
comprehensive. And because PERL forces a simple modular structure on you
in simple scripts, making it also surprisingly maintainable. It also has
those little features like taint mode that make it surprisingly easy to
write fairly secure CGI scripts.

Indeed. It also has the hard-to-match Test::* modules which allow you
to build QA into your build process.

The perl community has built up a huge ammount of good practice over
the years both based on our experience and taking ideas from Java,
Ruby, Python and academia as well as those crazy XP types.

CPAN also manages to feel like a eating termites, rather than an
Elephant, there is a lot of them, but you don't usually have to eat more
than one or two at a time, and the documentation is always in the same
format, and the same place, ....

Indeed, and under the same license, it also is built in 1 of 2 ways
and you can check reviews, ratings and test results for your platform.
It also has inbuilt dependancy checking and version management as well
as the ability to uninstall, downgrade and rollback or even bundle a
collection of modules together for easy installation.


Interestingly if I were doing document manipulations like creating PDF
documents PERL would be one of the first tools I would look at,
precisely because I'd expect CPAN to "just do it", and sure enough...

http://cpan.uwinnipeg.ca/search?query=PDF&mode=dist

PDF creation, parsing, reusing, converters to and from various other
formats, and a load more that I don't even understand the description,
but no doubt a PDF programmer would.

Indeed. Processing text and other data is what Perl does for breakfast. :)

Mainstream - don't you need PERL to install Solaris these days - I think
that is  close enough to mainstream - at least mainstream where the real
programmers live ;)

Most linux installs will grind to a halt without Perl, as will a huge
chunk of the internet and the international finance market,
dictionary/crossword compilation and various parts of your life you
didn't realise were powered by 'that cgi scripting language'.

This is why I say you really need perl in your toolbox - even Java
programmers are realising its a useful tool, worth having nearby. I
use perl to help test and debug my c# and .net stuff because I can
trace exactly what goes on the wire, automate tests, etc.

cheers,

A.

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