programming languages

[David Christensen]

-------- Original Message --------
Subject: OT: programming languages
Date: Sat, 28 Jun 2014 14:02:54 -0700
From: David Christensen <dpchrist at holgerdanske.com>
To: debian-user at lists.debian.org

On 06/28/2014 06:14 AM, slitt wrote:
> LOL, at a client's place, I was trying to customize the
> Perl-written Interchange web store software (don't ever use it, it's
> an atrocity) on circa 2003 Red Hat, and had to use CPAN for a new
> capability. That CPAN download broke the client's Vim and some other
> softwares. It took me 2 hours to undo the damage.

Only 2 hours?  You're good.


> That was the beginning of the end of my relationship with Perl.

CPAN dependency hell is definitely no fun, especially when your
distribution uses Perl internally.  Some Perl applications/ frameworks
come with their own module tree (and tools to maintain it).  Another
solution is bundling, such as the Cava packager [1].


I found Perl in 1998 and have yet to find anything I like better for my
interests (system scripting, data munging, number crunching).  After
reading HOP [2] and SICP2 [3], I realized that most common/ popular
languages easily give you imperative and OO styles, but Perl also makes
list and functional styles easy (and probably more).  I've found the
latter approaches to be more agreeable to my way of thinking (engines
working on sequences of data, rather than geneologically-related data
mutating itself), and my programs have become more flexible, concise,
and powerful as I write/ rewrite more Perl code using HOP/SICP ideas.
The key differentiator is the Lambda function ("closures") -- it gives
me separation of data and algorithms without the constraints of OO/
interface hierarchies or special template syntax (although I am still
tempted to use the C preprocessor for Log::Log4perl, benchmarking/
profiling, etc.).


What do people like instead of Perl, and why?


David

[1] http://www.cavapackager.com/

[2] http://hop.perl.plover.com/

[3] http://mitpress.mit.edu/sicp/full-text/book/book.html