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Two things are certain in life: every language has its pluses and minuses, and every person has an opinion. There are lots of things perl is bad at, but it ha

• benreesman 19y ago
  If there are libraries for doing biological computation written in Perl that do not have available bindings for other languages then that would constitute a reasonable excuse for using Perl. This would be just as true if the library was only available 1990s Visual Basic, and is just as irrelevant a factor in the assessment of a language as a whole. Beyond the availability of some particular piece of code (in my case the tens or hundreds of thousands of lines of legacy systems that I lack the resources to replace) there is literally no excuse for using Perl or for inflicting its insanity on another hapless generation of web programmers. All of Perl's admirable qualities (convenient object-literal notation, first-class functions, correct Scheme-style lexical scoping, powerful and seamless regular expressions, convenient string processing and Unix integration) are available in other languages. All of them, period. Many of these languages do not share Perl's unforgivable faults (sigils to dereference variable namespaces, contexts, typeglobs, references, dismal error handling facilities, confusing and nonstandard object facilities). The only way to use Perl to build a large system is to lean on Conway's methodology, which consists of a book that reads like an airtight indictment of Perl by one of its chief implementors and a collection of CPAN modules that demonstrate a brilliant mind with a perverse allegiance to a cult-like cause. Do sensible class hierarchies without Class::Std, I dare you. Do reasonable try-catch-finally exception semantics without Error.pm, I dare you. try { ... } otherwise { ... } finally { ... }; # works try { ... } otherwise { ... } finally { ... } # no trailing semicolon, oops I just clobbered your next statement and produced a catastrophic failure that even an experienced hacker could stare at for hours without seeing It only takes about two hours reading 'Perl Best Practices' to realize that it's a brilliant book, written by a brilliant mind to attempt to make Perl a workable language for building large systems. It's a shame because he comes so close, but it turns out you can't rewire a language like Perl with libraries alone, even if only because you can't compel others to use them. Perl is a language for expert hackers only, no one else should be allowed near it. And even expert hackers are working harder than they need to because there is a constant intellectual tax on the inconsistency of the language. It only offers a little bit more power than Python, and actually less than Ruby at a much higher cost. There is no excuse for Perl in the 21st century, and you clearly have not spent time trying to use it to build large and complex systems or else you would feel the same outrage that I do than anyone would continue to contemplate it.