[SunRescue] Anyone else here hate Perl?

[Greg A. Woods]

[ On Wednesday, April 4, 2001 at 04:55:25 (-0700), Chris Byrne wrote: ]
> Subject: RE: [SunRescue] Anyone else here hate Perl?
>
> That said, it still doesn't condemn the language as a whole. 

No, there's not one tiny thing good about Perl.  It was a horrible mess
in the beginning and the additional bloat is just a foolish attempt to
fix it after the fact.

> It just
> encourages uses for which it is entirely unsuited, such as writing an entire
> multi-thousand line application with another entire multi-thousand line GUI.
> These could generally be much more efficiiently programmed in C or Java.

Ah, ummm, maybe you should re-think that.  Even with a true Java
compiler (i.e. one that generates machine code directly ready to run on
the target processor), Java's still incredibly bloated and slow.  It's
even worse than that horrible abomination called "C++" (how more
incorrect could a name ever get)!

Heck even Smalltalk is faster than Java when you don't have a compiler.

> One good thing it has done is gotten a lot of people into coding. Of course
> the flip side of that is, as several people have mentioned, the tendency for
> those same people to want to do everything in perl.

Fooey!  There are well over 2 *million* Visual BASIC programmers -- they
swamp perl coders at least 10 to 1!

Not that that's a good thing -- just pointing out that Visual BASIC has
gotten more average people into coding than any other language.

-- 
							Greg A. Woods

+1 416 218-0098      VE3TCP      <gwoods at acm.org>      <robohack!woods>
Planix, Inc. <woods at planix.com>; Secrets of the Weird <woods at weird.com>