From: Peter Hickman <peter@...>
Date: 2004-01-29T23:16:31+09:00
Subject: Re: Project: in Ruby, Perl?

Phil Tomson wrote:

>Turns out that OOPerl tends to run slower than Ruby, so if you're planning 
>to do the project in an OO style, you should keep that in mind.
>
>  
>
We do all our work in OO Perl and I can't say that it has ever been a 
problem. There will always be a trade off between ease of use and raw 
speed. But we have a lot of code to maintain and the ease of use ticket 
wins every time.

>Perl as it is now has had it's day and now is starting to look a bit 
>too old.  I wouldn't recommend Perl for any real production system at 
>this point when there are much better alternatives available now (and I 
>used to be a big fan of Perl).  Perl6 may change my mind, but it's still 
>vaporware at this point.
>  
>
What does 'starting to look a bit too old' actually mean. Perl is used 
in many production systems and will continue to be used because it is 
good at getting the job done. Maybe familiarity has bred contempt for 
you but Perl can do almost anything, the rather modern field of 
bioinformatics has benefited greatly from using Perl. Whats 'too old' 
got to do with it?

>I think the main advantages Ruby offers over Perl are in the following areas:
>1) Maintainability (and readability): It's nice to come back to your code 
>   six months later and have a good idea of what you were trying to do 
>   and what you were thinking back when you wrote it.
>
I just went back to a four year old program of mine, it still works and 
I manages to extend it with little difficulty despite having not seen it 
for four years (the danger of putting your code out on the web).

>  One of the things 
>   that annoyed me the most about Perl readability was that you couldn't 
>   tell what arguments a function took just by quickly glancing at the code 
>   since they pass arguments via the @_ array.  You had to look through 
>   the whole function to see what was being shifted off of @_.
>  
>
Bad code is hard to read regardless of what language you use, ruby will 
not save you from writing bad code.

>Perl was great in it's day (5 to 10 years ago), but times have changed.
>
>  
>
Perl has changed too, and it will continue to do so. Please stay seated 
until the ride is over.