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Having to fight with the node.js package-space just increased my appreciation for CPAN, its content and users. Perl might never had much luster and got slightly
by mhd 12y ago
Having to fight with the node.js package-space just increased my appreciation for CPAN, its content and users. Perl might never had much luster and got slightly outpaced by other scripting languages within the last few years, but it's got a very solid foundation, unlike e.g. Tcl.
Managing projects with perlbrew and carton is pretty convenient, and you're free to choose between old-style modular development or various object systems, both lite and heavy, with syntactic sugar or not (recent discovery: Moops).
- davidw 12y agoWhat is 'unsolid' about Tcl? I'll take its source code any day over Perl's.
- mhd 12y agoDon't get me wrong, I'm not trying to Stallmann the language itself, I've always enjoyed working with Tcl. And as you say, it's got a pretty great source code. But you need more than one leg to stand on, and due to its embedded roots and other hysterical reasons, Tcl did a relatively bad job when it came to building a good package library and infrastructure. Which in turn hurt the community, which made for fewer package contributors and so forth. And once Tk lost most of its importance and languages like Lua appeared...
- davidw 12y agoTcl's package/repository story was certainly inferior to Perl's, and many other languages'. That's different from the language not being 'solid' though!
- sigzero 12y agoI love Tcl. It is the quirkiness (meaning non-Algol) of it that appeals to me. The community around it is great. The TCT puts a lot of thought into what goes in as well. I am on the dev list to just keep an eye on what goes on. :)
- SwellJoe 12y agoI've worked pretty heavily in both. I don't think Tcl is clearly superior, as a language, to Perl. And, certainly the CPAN is vastly more impressive and vital than the ecosystem around Tcl. One of the reasons I gave up on Tcl was because there just weren't enough people working in it to keep the libraries moving forward (and our website, built on OpenACS, was suffering for it). So, since we're talking about CPAN, I'd say that the library and development ecosystem around Tcl is "unsolid" where for Perl it is pretty impressive. It's only relatively recently that Python and Ruby have reached parity with CPAN, even.
- davidw 12y ago> Perl might never had much luster and got slightly outpaced by other scripting languages within the last few years, but it's got a very solid foundation, unlike e.g. Tcl. Was the phrase, though. I don't think anyone really questions whether CPAN is better than what Tcl had, and you can debate what you like about both languages, but to call Tcl unsolid is not very accurate, in my opinion.
- SwellJoe 12y agoI assumed what he meant by "the foundation" was the libraries and culture, which Perl demonstrably has gotten pretty right, while Tcl hasn't. If the foundation is everything you build your projects on top of, then Perl has a vastly better foundation. If the foundation is just the language itself, then Tcl is pretty good. So, I see where you're coming from if speaking only of the language itself. Tcl is a quite nice, well-thought-out, language. It has a few quirks, but so does Perl.
- mhd 12y agoYes, that's what I intended to say. Maybe "foundations" would've been clearer. The first two of which would probably be the language design itself and the implementation. I'd rather not argue about the former, and regarding the latter I don't have a lot of experience with Perl, although I've heard that it's gotten better once they awoke out of the post-Perl6 slump. Still, Tcl was always pretty great in that regard. But as we're talking about the CPAN here, a lot of the alternatives come out short-handed, and Tcl amongst them. I remember the days when you had a different interpreter for every extension...