At 10:51 AM 5/25/00 -0500, Jason Bodnar wrote:
>On 25-May-2000 Michael Nachbaur wrote:
> > This site will have major traffic, will need to be extended and changed (a
> > lot), and needs to scale very well. My experience with Perl (as well
> as what
> > I've heard from other developers) is that Perl turns to spaghetti rapidly
> > once you hit the 10,000 line mark.
>
>I don't think this is a perl-only problem. I also don't think this is a
>problem
>inherent to any high level language. Large projects get messy due to poor
>planning and bad programming. Why would Java or C (or any other language) not
>suffer from the same problems as Perl?
Compile-Time checking, strong-typing, syntactical glue to sandbox the
developer if anything looks odd to the language itself.
Well, yeah, C and Java can suffer the same problems as Perl, but because
Java is so constrained as a language, the design of the language has a
built in constraint. With Perl you can literally do ANYTHING, and to
program Perl in a clean, OO way takes a lot of experience or a good mentor.
> > I know Perl can handle the performance.
> > What are your experiences with extendability and readability of code?
>
>Again, this is a function of the development team not the language. I've
>developed some large scale web applications in Perl (intranet so I can't link
>to them) and I have no problem with extensability and readability. Again, it's
>just a matter of properly planning things before you write that first line of
>code. I just wrapped up the third version of some web discussion forums we use
>at Tivoli and had no problem adding new features to the application.
>
My experience is that most teams aren't as good as yours. And with IT staff
shortages at a high, there are a lot more newbies to programming coming
into the fray. I think that's great, but at the same time, I think we have
to be realistic about the expectations behind the code produced.
I think Perl is great, because I feel that if I work with someone who is
new, I can teach them. But how many people in the world are really
experienced with writing large-scale, clean Perl code. Even the town hall
of gurus at the Oreilly PerlCon had a minor debate about the ability of
Perl to do programming in-the-large.
At anyrate, At least we can probably all agree that Microsoft ASP/VBScript
is even worse for programming in-the-large. (for similar reasons, Perl has
a syntax that supports cleaner programming than ASP/VBScript)
Later,
Gunther
__________________________________________________
Gunther Birznieks ([EMAIL PROTECTED])
Extropia - The Web Technology Company
http://www.extropia.com/
