5 ms·
Performance. Perl was a legit tool in bioinformatics due to its insane text parsing performance. Ruby performance is absolute garbage.
by blacktriangle 6y ago
Performance.
Perl was a legit tool in bioinformatics due to its insane text parsing performance. Ruby performance is absolute garbage.
- yabadubakta 6y agoAnd ubiquity: there’s a Perl for almost all systems
- PLenz 6y agoI still do my NLP preprocessing in perl for this exact reason
- phone8675309 6y agoI learned Perl in the mid 2000s because I was working with a company that took text (and sometimes spreadsheet) dumps of public records data and processed them into a database. The entire ETL pipeline was a set of Perl scripts, and, as far as I know, that system is still running. The Perl iteration was actually the second iteration of that system - the first iteration was a set of C programs and shell scripts that were replaced over time. The rich ecosystem of tested Perl modules for file formats along with the testing frameworks made coping with change bearable - not enjoyable, but bearable.
- blacktriangle 6y agoOh man the ecosystem. I still think CPAN set the bar for what a high-quality language ecosystem should look like. npm and rubygems look like amateur hour by comparison.