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I see these justifications for perl almost every time it comes up - The community, cpan, writing lots of code fast. These are good things, but it's worth pointi

by kanja 14y ago

I see these justifications for perl almost every time it comes up - The community, cpan, writing lots of code fast. These are good things, but it's worth pointing out that EVERY OTHER LANGUAGE DOES THAT. Ruby has gem, python has pip - modern languages have these things built in by design. Not to hate on perl, because there's things I like about it, but this article could be retitled "what I like about not using fortran"

chromatic 14y ago
I know of no other language that has anything like cpantesters.org. Everything that gets uploaded to the CPAN gets tested automatically on a large matrix of Perl versions and host platforms, often within minutes of the upload. Furthermore, the entirety of CPAN is the continuous integration test suite for Perl 5 itself. Edit to add: I know why this sounded familiar! I had forgotten I wrote about it recently: http://www.modernperlbooks.com/mt/2012/08/why-i-use-perl-testing.html http://www.modernperlbooks.com/mt/2012/08/why-i-use-perl-tes...
tlianza 14y ago
I use Perl for the Turing completeness.
berntb 14y ago
>> EVERY OTHER LANGUAGE DOES THAT Do you really know about this? I've done a bit of Python lately. The infrastructure isn't close (see e.g. Perl Testers, chromatic had a blog post about it quite recently). Also, CPAN is much richer than pypi.
- asher 14y ago
  Which modules are missing on Pypi?
  - berntb 14y ago
    Off the top of my head -- a serious sql parser and the whole TAP test ecosystem. After a while I stopped checking cpan for what I needed, since I just got angry. Another difference: In the Perl world, you can find and have dependency trees with dozens to hundreds of modules installed from cpan -- and you expect it to work, particularly since the module tests by default are run at install. (It is a bit painful with too many dependencies, but it works if you need it.)
    - brekken 14y ago
      I think there are many cases where packages may not be in one language repo, but in another. However, Python does have a lot of testing packages available that do a swell job. Also, the JUnit test-report format these days tends to be what I see a lot of. http://wiki.python.org/moin/PythonTestingToolsTaxonomy http://wiki.python.org/moin/PythonTestingToolsTaxonomy Also, as far as SQL, and even Object Relational Mappers goes, there's SQL Alchemy. You can verify they are present here, in PyPi: http://pypi.python.org/pypi http://pypi.python.org/pypi
      - berntb 14y ago
        SQL Alchemy doesn't have an SQL parser, which I asked for. See http://search.cpan.org/~rehsack/SQL-Statement/ http://search.cpan.org/~rehsack/SQL-Statement/ It contains a parser and evaluates SQL expressions on lots of data sources(!). The testing tools on Perl use a common infrastructure and can work with each others in a plugin fashion.
  - adrianhoward 14y ago
    It's not the modules - it's the infrastructure of the CPAN environment. See this comment on an old Perl thread for some pointers http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4042344 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4042344
rb2k_ 14y ago
Java doesn't have any of them.

by kanja 14y ago

chromatic 14y ago

I know of no other language that has anything like cpantesters.org. Everything that gets uploaded to the CPAN gets tested automatically on a large matrix of Perl versions and host platforms, often within minutes of the upload. Furthermore, the entirety of CPAN is the continuous integration test suite for Perl 5 itself. Edit to add: I know why this sounded familiar! I had forgotten I wrote about it recently: http://www.modernperlbooks.com/mt/2012/08/why-i-use-perl-testing.html http://www.modernperlbooks.com/mt/2012/08/why-i-use-perl-tes...

tlianza 14y ago

I use Perl for the Turing completeness.

berntb 14y ago

>> EVERY OTHER LANGUAGE DOES THAT Do you really know about this? I've done a bit of Python lately. The infrastructure isn't close (see e.g. Perl Testers, chromatic had a blog post about it quite recently). Also, CPAN is much richer than pypi.

asher 14y ago
Which modules are missing on Pypi?
- berntb 14y ago
  Off the top of my head -- a serious sql parser and the whole TAP test ecosystem. After a while I stopped checking cpan for what I needed, since I just got angry. Another difference: In the Perl world, you can find and have dependency trees with dozens to hundreds of modules installed from cpan -- and you expect it to work, particularly since the module tests by default are run at install. (It is a bit painful with too many dependencies, but it works if you need it.)
  - brekken 14y ago
    I think there are many cases where packages may not be in one language repo, but in another. However, Python does have a lot of testing packages available that do a swell job. Also, the JUnit test-report format these days tends to be what I see a lot of. http://wiki.python.org/moin/PythonTestingToolsTaxonomy http://wiki.python.org/moin/PythonTestingToolsTaxonomy Also, as far as SQL, and even Object Relational Mappers goes, there's SQL Alchemy. You can verify they are present here, in PyPi: http://pypi.python.org/pypi http://pypi.python.org/pypi
    - berntb 14y ago
      SQL Alchemy doesn't have an SQL parser, which I asked for. See http://search.cpan.org/~rehsack/SQL-Statement/ http://search.cpan.org/~rehsack/SQL-Statement/ It contains a parser and evaluates SQL expressions on lots of data sources(!). The testing tools on Perl use a common infrastructure and can work with each others in a plugin fashion.
- adrianhoward 14y ago
  It's not the modules - it's the infrastructure of the CPAN environment. See this comment on an old Perl thread for some pointers http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4042344 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4042344

rb2k_ 14y ago

Java doesn't have any of them.