On Thu, Mar 26, 2009 at 3:44 PM, Octavian Râsnita <orasn...@gmail.com>wrote:
> *From:* Rolf Banting <rolf.b...@gmail.com> > > Foo JH wrote: > > In the academia the general directive in choosing a language would be > > something to this effect: > > 1. teach modern language concepts, such as OO > > 2. minimise the learning curve by way of something easy to teach, easy > > to learn without having to figure out all the details of programming > > 3. introduce the students to a language that will make them attractive > > to the general market > > > > You probably have a feel why Perl isn't a strong choice given these > > objectives. > > > On points 1 & 2: > > 1. Perl supports more programming paradigms than Java. > > 2. You write fewer lines of perl to get things done than you do in Java. > 1. I don't know what it means that perl supports more paradigms than Java, > but I know that the Java / C# OOP style is usually considered a much > complete and better standard than one used by Perl. > > Functions are first class citizens in Perl - so you get functional programming built in. You don't in Java. How are standards of OO quantified and compared? > Java / DotNet support interfaces, so the classes they create respect the > "contracts" better, while in perl world, the programmer is free, and nobody > points a shotgun to him in order to force him to do it. > > Java and C# uses a dot notation for separating the classes when using the > OOP style, and even Template-Toolkit uses it, but perl uses something else. > > > C++ uses '::' > 2. It is right that perl is probably one of the most productive languages, > because it requires to write very little code, for doing very many things. > But for doing the same thing, Ruby and Python can use sometimes even less > code, because they don't use so much punctuation and funny char > > And anyway, for the beginners, this is not a big problem. The biggest > problem is that perl is harder to learn. The programmers might want to learn > a language for a year, and get a job, and after this they hope that they > will find time to learn the chosen language better while they have a job. > > Harder to learn than what? Is there any evidence for this? > > We could say that perl would be really great for these days if we could say > about it something like: > - It is the most easy to learn language even by the most stupid > programmers. > > It is easy to learn! > - It can create portable programs that can run everywhere, under Windows, > Mac, Linux, shared hosting web sites that don't offer root and shell access. > > - The source code of the programs can be hidden. > > - There are very many recent books that teach Perl. > > Why is "recent" important? The language features haven't changed much so why would the learning resources? > - Perl is chosen by bigger companies like IBM, Oracle, Microsoft, Sun, > Yahoo, Google, SAP. > - The popular sites like Twitter, Digg, Facebook, MySpace, Wikipedia, are > powered by perl. > - There are important other software made in Perl which are used much these > days, like a mailing list manager, a web server, financial charting > software, stock exchange trading applications, etc. > > I know of perl CORBA applications that have been responsible for charging literally millions of real-time short messages in telecomms networks in Latin America. > > ...and other things like these. But unfortunately in the last years I've > seen only reports about the decreasing number of sites that use Perl. > > Octavian > > > Use of perl is declining - but not due to lack of technical merit. Fashions change.
