At 2003-06-17 01:16 -0500, John Nichel wrote: >Jaap van Ganswijk wrote: ><snip> >>Some of the O'Reilly books that I thought were >>not perfect: >>- All books about Perl. Now that we have nice >> c-like script languages like PHP, Python and >> Javascript who still wants to study the mess >> that Perl is? ><snip> > >The O'Reilly Perl books are considered to be like Perl Bibles by most Perl >programmers (myself included).
I have 'Perl in a Nutshell' as part of the Perl CD-Bookshelf (which has about 5 more books on CD). And I have the Perl 5 Pocket Reference in Dutch, and yes the books are of the to-be-expected O'Reilly quality, as far as I have read them, but why did Perl ever become a standard and who still needs it? It probably became a standard because the designers of compiled languages recognized too late that because of the increased speed and memory of computers the interpreted languages became a viable option (again). And Perl was probably indeed a lot more powerful than the commands built into the shells, but already the designers of the c-shell realized that some more c-like structure wouldn't hurt the programming language of a shell. In Perl however everything was solved as ad-hoc as possible. As soon as a new 'problem' occured, Larry Wall found another combination of weird characters to denote it and so he created exception upon exception. It's not strange that programmers need stacks of 'bibles' to program in Perl, whereas you only need to read through the introduction of the PHP manual once to understand the language. After that, most time is being spend on understanding the principle of interactive HTTP-based programming and on getting to understand all the library functions (like in many languages). >I may be biased, but I did some homework (as I look at the 8 non-O'Reilly Perl books >on my shelf that have gathered dust for over a year now while the Camel book sits >open on my desk (it's usual place)). When you look beyond the web (which Perl was >never designed for), Perl was never really designed. Good designs are as simple as possible and orthogonal. >Perl is one of, if not the most powerful scripting language out there. How do you define powerful? Being able to denote with only a few weird characters a complete program? I can design a language in which you can write a program which consists of only a '.' and it will handle a database, build a robot for you that cleans out your refrigerator and picks up the phone. But how flexible will the programming language be? Is it possible to write a ',' instead of a '.' and will it be a perfect CAD-CAM program with which you can also access the IRC? Or is a good language such that it has no more elements and concepts than needed whereby all elements are orthogonal and are all combinable to provide real expression power. >PHP is the greatest thing to hit the web since the >graphical browser, but beyond that, it can't compete >with Perl. It's in the mean time perfectly possible to write normal command line interface (CLI) PHP scripts. I'm thinking about replacing a lot of the written-in-C compiler-like applications with which I compile my 30 Mbyte WWW site about chips with PHP-written scripts. The string handling is much better than in C. In another thread someone asked if functions should output data directly to the standard output or only return it in string form. This is one of the problems with my c-written code: It usually outputs directly to some sort of output stream but it would be much more flexible if all functions returned strings, so the output could be redirected via filters etc. >Python comes close, I like Python too. >but Perl is just too big and global for Python to handle. But serious programmers never programmed in Perl. It was much more the language for system and network managers that had no formal programming education and quickly had to fix things. As with Forth it's very hard even to read back ones own script after a couple of days let alone the programs of others. I can easily read back C programs I wrote 10 years ago and immediately understand what they do. >And JavaScript? Well, let me just say that JavaScript handles the Microsoft IE DOM >better than Perl. I was talking about Javascript as a language. Of course it's power is very limited since it has to be safe enough so hosts can send it to the client's browser to be executed. The language itself is very nice though. By the way, I think there should be only one language and depending on the circumstances more or fewer of the constructs and standard functions in it would be allowed. There should ideally also be only one set of libraries. Greetings, Jaap -- Chip Directory -- http://www.chipdir.biz/ -- http://www.chipdir.info/ -- http://www.chipdir.net/ -- http://www.chipdir.nl/ -- http://www.chipdir.org/ -- And about 30 other mirror sites world-wide. -- -- To subscribe to a free 'chip issues, questions and answers' -- mailing list, send a message to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with -- in the body 'subscribe chipdir-L'. About 500 experts are -- willing to think with you about electronics problems etc. -- PHP General Mailing List (http://www.php.net/) To unsubscribe, visit: http://www.php.net/unsub.php
