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I personally found that I didn't need Perl at all. I am a bioinformatics programmer/scientist and Perl was the first language I learned. I find that whatever I
by buckwild 15y ago
I personally found that I didn't need Perl at all. I am a bioinformatics programmer/scientist and Perl was the first language I learned. I find that whatever I can do in Perl I can do with bash/awk/sed--and whatever I can't do with bash/awk/sed I can do in Python. I've never been happier.
- lambda_cube 15y agoWhatever you can do in one Turing complete language you can also do in all other Turing complete languages. The point isn't what you can do, the point is what tasks are easier, simpler or faster to do in one language compared to another language, while also respecting how hard the language is to learn to get to the point where can can do what you want (easily). I would prefer to use Perl over bash/awk/sed since Perl is good at the same things and more and has alot more libraries.
- neuroelectronic 15y agoobviously in such a small (in terms of computing in general) discipline, a general purpose language might not be the best. Now if you want to publish your results to AWS and a website and pull data from a website front-end, etc. You can probably do it quickest with ducttape.
- jrockway 15y agoPerl's advantage over bash/awk/sed is that you can test, organize, and maintain code more effectively. This may not matter if you are programming to solve tiny unrelated problems, but it's a waste of effort if you are doing similar things frequently. Python is basically Perl but with different syntax, libraries, and community.
- Cushman 15y agoOut of curiosity, what do you consider to distinguish one Turing-complete language from another aside from those three traits?
- jrockway 15y agoSemantics. For example, writing a program to read "2 + 2" and evaluate the result is going to be very different from Perl and Python in Java or C++.
- jeberle 15y agoI agree w/ you about 90% on this. However, you're painting w/ a broad brush including Awk and Sed. I imagine beyond 10 lines of Awk (gsub, anyone?) or about 1 line of Sed things get tenuous, and you would want to reach for Perl or Python. Sed & Awk are great for tiny stuff, but wear thin fast. The realm of text-only problems, about 15 to 40 lines of code is where I find Perl shines. Python is probably my favorite language, but it can be horribly clunky for these sorts of tasks.