Gabor (the stirrer;-) wrote: > It does not have a "father". What if those people lose interest.
Having a "father" does not help. People can still lose interest. What if the father goes out of business? Or is bought by another company? Languages go in and out of fashion. Do Delphi and PowerBuilder, for example, have a rosy future? I once worked for a company with millions of line investment in a 4GL ... then the company that made it went out of business. Oops. Worse, without the source code, it was impossible to fix bugs in the interpreter or port it to more modern OS versions. At least with Perl you have all the source code. > What about copyright issues ? I'll need to ask our lawyer ($200/hour) for > every library we download. I'm interested in this. Does anyone know if there has ever been a court case re (mis-)use of CPAN modules? I do worry about it a little, but don't seek a legal opinion, just check the license that comes with the module. I heard a CPAN author recently got an email from IBM asking a long list of questions, such as how can he be sure that every patch he has received from third parties for his module is 100% clean. However, I'm not convinced that Perl is any more troublesome than Java in this regard. For example, precisely which parts of Java (JRE/JDK/Jakarta/ other 3rd party Java libraries ...) are you allowed to redistribute with your commerical application? What are the legal implications of reverse engineering Java byte code? Or cutting and pasting JDK source code into your commercial app, then editing it? > Perl is an old langugage, does it have objects anyway ? Yes. And Perl (like C++) lets you choose the appropriate style for each problem, not forcing you to use OO when it's inappropriate. Personally, I dislike OO-Fascist languages (such as Java and Smalltalk). > what you pay is what you get. Rubbish. There are many counter-examples to this rule, especially in software (and perfumes, where setting the price is more or less a marketing decision, I think). > Hardware is cheap, it is not relevant. Rubbish again. People have been claiming this for years. Though I admit it seems to be slowly becoming less important. > Installing 50 modules from CPAN is a nightmare. Why? I find it enjoyable. > So what are the pros ? To me, a big advantage of using a language like Perl or Ruby or Python over Java or C++ is that you write far fewer lines of code (sometimes a factor of 10, depending on the problem domain) to solve the same problem. An example I remember is a 100-line Java program: http://java.sun.com/developer/qow/archive/184/index.jsp that can be easily solved in one line of Perl: perl -ne'/^192\.(?:9|18|29)\./||/\.(?:gif|GIF|jpg|JPG|css|CSS) HTTP/ or print' inf >p The Perl version also runs much faster (though that is not acknowledged in the java.sun.com article). /-\ Find local movie times and trailers on Yahoo! Movies. http://au.movies.yahoo.com
