[rescue] flamewar question: Perl

[David Cantrell]

Tugrul Galatali <tugrul at galatali.com> wrote:

> 	As far as it stands as a language, I have no clue. Its been a year
> since I used it in any serious capacity, and within the confines of a job it
> was easier to hack things together than to "do it right" by the language. I
> will have to investigate objects before I try using it seriously again. I'd
> like to have a real framework in my next webapp.
> 
> 	mod_perl + DBI + HTML::Template <-> Whoa

Which templating solution to use is cause for religious wars in the perl
community right now :-(  The current cult-of-choice seems to be
Template Toolkit.

For doing OO work, it can be very good indeed.  Perhaps too powerful
though.  There's *lots* of sick and twisted things you can do which are
not possible in other languages.  Like, for instance, changing an object's
inheritance at run-time.  Perl's really good at letting you shoot yourself
in the foot.  It also doesn't do anything to protect an object's private
data.  You can write code to make that happen, of course, but perl
prefers to rely on good manners instead of security guards.

If you are going to do perly objecty stuff, you must get Damian Conway's
book Object-Oriented Perl (pub Manning).  Disclaimer: I was one of the
tech reviewers, I got a free copy.

> 	And there is the problem that even though a lot of freely available
> modules exist, you will always find code that is jibberish. Its hard to 
> embrace and extend other peoples work :(

Mmm.  As good as CPAN is - and it's very good indeed, in fact, perl's
real strength isn't the language itself, but that huge well-known archive -
there is virtually no quality control.  There's a lot of crap there,
plenty of duplication with modules trying to all scratch the same itch and
all doing so in slightly different ways, and no security.  People are
*far* too trusting of CPAN code.  And it does take time and experience to
sort the good modules from the dross.

There have been a couple of attempts at imposing some kind of quality
control on CPAN, but neither has come to much yet.

-- 
David Cantrell | david at cantrell.org.uk | http://www.cantrell.org.uk/david

Do not be afraid of cooking, as your ingredients will know and misbehave
   -- Fergus Henderson