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Speaking as the primary author of a book in one of the popular perl web frameworks (who is having difficulty doing stuff other than perl because a. my skills i

Speaking as the primary author of a book in one of the popular perl web frameworks (who is having difficulty doing stuff other than perl because a. my skills in perl are too much in demand, and b. Because for most of my normal work I haven't found anything perl can't do as easily or easier than other tools yet) here's my semi-considered opinion. Meh, all the dynamic languages are basically the same. They're all basically things that manpipulate strings and C pointers. For perl/python/ruby/js here's what I'd sort of recommend: * Pick from your team's strength, unless: * Lots of turnkey logic, code quality and debug tools are not a priority, and you want to be able to hire fast and cheap: PHP. * Lots of turnkey logic, per-performance isn't a problem and you want some higher order programming capability: Ruby. * You want to manage a java-like large team for not so trivial logic, and you prioritise uniformity over expressivity. Python. Also python is a good environment for academic work as it helps the academic programmers not shoot themselves in the foot so much and academic code is a mess. Which is why python is such a good extension language for other tools. * Async greenfield stuff where you don't need to worry about external libraries much: javascript. Also the only game in town for web front ends (plus its transpiling friends). Javascript is like a syntatically impoverished perl in this regard. * You've got a whole bunch of mess in business logic and/or systems logic that you need to encapsulate, and you've got a small highly capable team who want to prioritise expressivity over uniformity. Perl excels here. So does python, but it'll make you do even more horrible things papering over the mess. Regarding the last point, I believe if it reaches a tipping point perl 6 will be a good thing for async, multicore and parsing related stuff, and should be long-term productive and reduce the requirement for having as highly capable and a disciplined team that is really a requirement for non-trivial perl5 code bases. Also perl5 is second to none for programming language back compat. I had a decent sized non-trivial project I'd written for internal (research) purposes, then neglected for several years. Then I had to look at the running code again. I'd been through several minor OS upgrades, moved to a completely different OS and gone through at least three major versions of perl. Aside from a couple of missing CPAN modules that I had forgotten about in the Makefile.PL, everything was fine out of the box.

amenod 11y ago
I have a nagging feeling that server side JavaScript will soon become the new PHP. It is getting more and more popular among not-so-good programmers, and given its loose syntax I think it will lead to disastrous code. Not to mention that ECMA is working toward ADDING new feature to the language instead of deprecating some obscure ones, which would make the language easier to use. Of course, PHP makers made their share of mistakes with their decisions - register_globals, safe_mode (which was not), inconsistent function naming in standard libs, myriad of weird bugs (like syntax error (still) throwing HTTP response 200),...
- gsnedders 11y ago
  > Not to mention that ECMA is working toward ADDING new feature to the language instead of deprecating some obscure ones, which would make the language easier to use. We'll see what happens longer-term. Certainly until recently the focus has been on the web (and deprecating features on the web is rather pointless: the web still supports things that were deprecated two decades ago, as dropping support breaks sites which makes users change browser or stick with an older version). There's plenty of things listed in Appendix B of the spec, "Additional ECMAScript Features for Web Browsers", which contains much of the worst parts. Perhaps more will move there in the future, or to some separate section of previously-standardised-but-now-optional features.
- tracker1 11y ago
  As a fan of node.js, I'm afraid you are probably right... and not just front end guys. Some of the most horrific JS code tends to come from (imho) "enterprise" C# and Java devs... there are some patterns you just do not need to do in a dynamic language environment... and only complicates things for no real gain. There are some really beautiful patterns emerging in the JS community though. React (mercury and others), Redux, RxJS, Koa, etc... But it takes a different kind of discipline to break up modules, and write pure functions instead of relying on typical OO paradigms for systems development. I cringe every time I see a senseless/useless DI/IoC system in JS that adds nothing but indirection and complexity (looking at you Angular).
  - 11y ago

amenod 11y ago

I have a nagging feeling that server side JavaScript will soon become the new PHP. It is getting more and more popular among not-so-good programmers, and given its loose syntax I think it will lead to disastrous code. Not to mention that ECMA is working toward ADDING new feature to the language instead of deprecating some obscure ones, which would make the language easier to use. Of course, PHP makers made their share of mistakes with their decisions - register_globals, safe_mode (which was not), inconsistent function naming in standard libs, myriad of weird bugs (like syntax error (still) throwing HTTP response 200),...

gsnedders 11y ago
> Not to mention that ECMA is working toward ADDING new feature to the language instead of deprecating some obscure ones, which would make the language easier to use. We'll see what happens longer-term. Certainly until recently the focus has been on the web (and deprecating features on the web is rather pointless: the web still supports things that were deprecated two decades ago, as dropping support breaks sites which makes users change browser or stick with an older version). There's plenty of things listed in Appendix B of the spec, "Additional ECMAScript Features for Web Browsers", which contains much of the worst parts. Perhaps more will move there in the future, or to some separate section of previously-standardised-but-now-optional features.
tracker1 11y ago
As a fan of node.js, I'm afraid you are probably right... and not just front end guys. Some of the most horrific JS code tends to come from (imho) "enterprise" C# and Java devs... there are some patterns you just do not need to do in a dynamic language environment... and only complicates things for no real gain. There are some really beautiful patterns emerging in the JS community though. React (mercury and others), Redux, RxJS, Koa, etc... But it takes a different kind of discipline to break up modules, and write pure functions instead of relying on typical OO paradigms for systems development. I cringe every time I see a senseless/useless DI/IoC system in JS that adds nothing but indirection and complexity (looking at you Angular).
- 11y ago