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What do you consider a "serious language"? In its class of languages Perl is one of the fastest. Anyway, this is about speeding up Perl and not "Why use Perl in

by sigzero 11y ago

What do you consider a "serious language"? In its class of languages Perl is one of the fastest. Anyway, this is about speeding up Perl and not "Why use Perl instead of <compiled language of choice>".

jerf 11y ago
"What do you consider a "serious language"?" Ironically, you're being prickly in exactly the wrong direction. Perl is totally a serious language. I do most of my work in it, in fact. I qualify it with "serious language" because when I say it's one of the slowest serious languages, it's no fair to counter that by pointing out somebody's hobby implementation of Lispcheme that's a hundred time slower. "In its class of languages Perl is one of the fastest." Well... I suppose... since essentially all original C-interpreter implementations of the 1990s-style dynamic scripting languages have performance within about 20% of each other, that's not false... but the marketing-style implication that Perl is the fastest certainly is false. (Also LuaJIT is way faster, but does "compromise" relative to some Perl features to get there.) Drop the "C-interpreter" clause and Perl's in real trouble... Javascript isn't the C-speed language it sometimes gets presented as but JIT'ed JS really will handily beat Perl, and PyPy is... weirdly complicated from a performance perspective. The point is still that talking about Perl as a perfomant language on almost any measure is... very weird. It's not. It's possible to name several serious languages which are as slow, but not one that clearly slower.
- sreque 11y ago
  It feels rare to find someone who can be honest about the shortcomings of their day-job programming language. Kudos to you!
  - eropple 11y ago
    Seriously. I've run into static from fanboys at pretty much every job because of it. People getting prickly because of criticisms about Java, because...well, they write Java. (I rarely say they know Java, but, different problem.) Seeing some frank discussion, as is going on in this thread, is really nice.

by sigzero 11y ago

jerf 11y ago

"What do you consider a "serious language"?" Ironically, you're being prickly in exactly the wrong direction. Perl is totally a serious language. I do most of my work in it, in fact. I qualify it with "serious language" because when I say it's one of the slowest serious languages, it's no fair to counter that by pointing out somebody's hobby implementation of Lispcheme that's a hundred time slower. "In its class of languages Perl is one of the fastest." Well... I suppose... since essentially all original C-interpreter implementations of the 1990s-style dynamic scripting languages have performance within about 20% of each other, that's not false... but the marketing-style implication that Perl is the fastest certainly is false. (Also LuaJIT is way faster, but does "compromise" relative to some Perl features to get there.) Drop the "C-interpreter" clause and Perl's in real trouble... Javascript isn't the C-speed language it sometimes gets presented as but JIT'ed JS really will handily beat Perl, and PyPy is... weirdly complicated from a performance perspective. The point is still that talking about Perl as a perfomant language on almost any measure is... very weird. It's not. It's possible to name several serious languages which are as slow, but not one that clearly slower.

sreque 11y ago
It feels rare to find someone who can be honest about the shortcomings of their day-job programming language. Kudos to you!
- eropple 11y ago
  Seriously. I've run into static from fanboys at pretty much every job because of it. People getting prickly because of criticisms about Java, because...well, they write Java. (I rarely say they know Java, but, different problem.) Seeing some frank discussion, as is going on in this thread, is really nice.