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A few years ago I did a lot of Perl work. Since I do interactive multimedia, I wanted to try my hand at game programming (Frozen Bubble is written in Perl, it c

A few years ago I did a lot of Perl work. Since I do interactive multimedia, I wanted to try my hand at game programming (Frozen Bubble is written in Perl, it couldn't be that hard, right?). At the time, however, the only graphics libraries were extremely limited, which forced me to work in different languages. Recently, a new awesome SDL library has been created: http://sdl.perl.org/ http://sdl.perl.org/ that actually supports drawing lines on the screen! It's really tempting to make some perl games again. Right now I'm using the Effect Engine which has a perl backend. It's wonderfully written and straightforward. Many of the "simple" things it does would have been a lot more complicated had they been written using other popular languages. The library support also means that extending anything is easy as pie.

agentultra 15y ago
I made a few patches for SDL::Perl and I'm a fan. I also helped do some of the porting work on Frozen Bubble and Pangzero to the new APIs. It was pretty fun. Perl isn't easy to learn because it's difficult to become familiar with it. However, I found it enjoyable to work with. It's certainly a little quirky but for a dynamic language it is also quite malleable. My example is Moose: Perl didn't ship with an OO system but is flexible enough that Perl6's object model could be back ported. Don't like Moose? There are others. Or you could just use straight blessed hashes (which Python, Ruby, and others just put syntactic sugar around). For a dynamic language it's pretty nice. But I don't think it's going to be winning many converts these days. The tower of babel had fallen long ago and people are starting to pick up the pieces again. Languages that stray too far from the squishy middle of collective wisdom, I fear, are likely to relegate themselves to history. That being said, Perl does have an excellent community. And I really like reading Perl books. They're really fun where too many are either dry or over-compensating in quirkiness. Perhaps its those unixy origins that still pull me to it.

agentultra 15y ago

I made a few patches for SDL::Perl and I'm a fan. I also helped do some of the porting work on Frozen Bubble and Pangzero to the new APIs. It was pretty fun. Perl isn't easy to learn because it's difficult to become familiar with it. However, I found it enjoyable to work with. It's certainly a little quirky but for a dynamic language it is also quite malleable. My example is Moose: Perl didn't ship with an OO system but is flexible enough that Perl6's object model could be back ported. Don't like Moose? There are others. Or you could just use straight blessed hashes (which Python, Ruby, and others just put syntactic sugar around). For a dynamic language it's pretty nice. But I don't think it's going to be winning many converts these days. The tower of babel had fallen long ago and people are starting to pick up the pieces again. Languages that stray too far from the squishy middle of collective wisdom, I fear, are likely to relegate themselves to history. That being said, Perl does have an excellent community. And I really like reading Perl books. They're really fun where too many are either dry or over-compensating in quirkiness. Perhaps its those unixy origins that still pull me to it.