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Perl? You serious? Are you developing text-based system?

• mahmud 16y ago
  My first Perl application, after I put my Win3 app on hold, was a desktop GUI app for printing mailing labels. It had a builtin list building engine that scraped counties throughout Virginia and found information on new home buyers, and applications for building renovation. It took me 20 days to develop. Perl/Tk. If memory service me right, and I really could be wrong .. I think I must have been the first one in the world to hack together a bridge between Perl and Office 2000, because I had a developer preview. ActivePerl .. now that was a delightful platform. Perl empowered me. If it wasn't for Perl, I might have quit software altogether and became a philosophy major, or worse, a mathematician.
• nrr 16y ago
  The only major failing of Perl is that its error handling facilities just flat out suck. Outside of that, it's a very modern language, albeit a little esoteric at times, and writing maintainable systems with it is possible with some discipline and common sense. To boot, Perl natively supports modules written in C, and by way of DynaLoader.pm, a programmer can do fun things with exported symbols from object code. I wouldn't go as far as to call DynaLoader.pm a proper FFI, but it definitely gets the job done a lot of the time.