There are better scripting languages now ... (Perl)

Member Name: archfiend

Product:	Perl
Date:	26/07/00 (49 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: free, great support network, large existing codebase

Disadvantages: easy to get into bad habits, 'write-only ' code

Let me nail my standard to the mast and say that I'm not a great fan of Perl. I've used it, on and off, for a couple of years -- long enough to be impressed at how quickly it is possible to develop applications and knock out little text processing scripts, but also long enough to grind my teeth and do my nut trying to read and comprehend perl script written by other coders.

At the core of Perl is a fabulous little regex (regular expression) parser, which makes it possible to do even quite complicated text processing with a fraction of the effort or overheads that would be required in a language like C or Java. As with so many open source products (Perl is free, of course), online support is fantastic but sporadic. You can chat to some of the original designers on appropriate newsgroups, and tap into a vast community of perl coders and existing code fragments for help when you need it.

Unfortunately, because Perl is such a free and easy language, it's very easy to get into bad habits and write completely unreadable code. If you want to code Perl, you will want the O'Reilly book (I've seen others which were fine but I think it's the pick of the bunch).

My current opinion -- liable to change -- is that I would always recommend people to look at Python instead. It's also a scripting language, also open source, so is also free and can do all the same things, but is a good deal easier to use and better designed. www.python.org for more details.

It's purely because there are better scripting languages than Perl in existence, which are easy to get hold of, that I've given Perl a lower score. It's fine for what it does, but you can do better.


la fiend

Summary: