Friday, February 29, 2008
Perl, Scripting, and the Smartness of Others
Perl is the name of a programming language I like.
Meaning, I like the name, and I like the language. Perl opened an ecological niche for programming languages that may have since been filled with other, better languages, but Perl was first. The other languages even have fun names. Python and Ruby come to mind in particular.
The niche is hard to describe- people call them "scripting" languages, but that term only has meaning when they're used for writing scripts (programs that control other programs, basically). Which is not, for the most part, what people do with these languages any more.
The thing that distinguishes the best of these languages is the relationship between development time and execution time. The languages allow people to write code quickly, which may or may not run quickly. They are best used in scenarios where the difference between one second and two seconds probably doesn't matter. For the most part.
Real scripting languages are still used mostly for scripting (e.g. sed, awk, bash). But Perl expanded this niche beyond scripting, and that's one of the things I like it for. People have used Perl for development of all kinds of applications over the past couple decades. Yes, perl is ancient.
When I was thinking about this post, I re-read Steve Yegge's essay about ancient Perl. It's full of his usual blah-blah-blah, but one point in particular amused me:
CPAN is institutional knowledge of a bunch of badass Perl hackers dumped into a central place and mirrored around the world for anyone to use. It is as schizophrenic and disorganized as you might expect from this kind of a resource. But it's also the answer to a big load of common problems that Perl hackers have had. And man, do Perl hackers have problems.
For all of the better-ness of other languages (and I really do like the syntax of those languages better in some ways), they still lack a CPAN. Some of them probably consider this a feature more than it is a bug, which may be the biggest bug of all.
Python and Ruby and their many friends fixed lots of problems with Perl syntax, and maybe even with Perl culture. But while they were busy throwing away the bad syntax Perl inherited from the real scripting languages, they left but the one feature that made Perl more than a novelty, which was not what we could do with it, but what others had already done.
Meaning, I like the name, and I like the language. Perl opened an ecological niche for programming languages that may have since been filled with other, better languages, but Perl was first. The other languages even have fun names. Python and Ruby come to mind in particular.
The niche is hard to describe- people call them "scripting" languages, but that term only has meaning when they're used for writing scripts (programs that control other programs, basically). Which is not, for the most part, what people do with these languages any more.
The thing that distinguishes the best of these languages is the relationship between development time and execution time. The languages allow people to write code quickly, which may or may not run quickly. They are best used in scenarios where the difference between one second and two seconds probably doesn't matter. For the most part.
Real scripting languages are still used mostly for scripting (e.g. sed, awk, bash). But Perl expanded this niche beyond scripting, and that's one of the things I like it for. People have used Perl for development of all kinds of applications over the past couple decades. Yes, perl is ancient.
When I was thinking about this post, I re-read Steve Yegge's essay about ancient Perl. It's full of his usual blah-blah-blah, but one point in particular amused me:
You see, someday I will start my own company, and I'll decide my own hiring bar. I'll of course be my own company's chief technical officer (wouldn't you?), so I'll decide how I expect people to engineer their software. And there will be no Perl. So there's no need for me to get worked up about its use at Amazon. Whew. I feel so much better.I did start my own company. And we did use Perl. Steve Yegge probably makes as much money in a month at Google as I did by selling that company, but it still gives me a very different perspective. We used Perl because it blurred the boundary I talked about earlier, and because of CPAN. The Comprehensive Perl Archive Network. What a beautiful thing. For all they've done, none of those other, better languages have replicated CPAN.
CPAN is institutional knowledge of a bunch of badass Perl hackers dumped into a central place and mirrored around the world for anyone to use. It is as schizophrenic and disorganized as you might expect from this kind of a resource. But it's also the answer to a big load of common problems that Perl hackers have had. And man, do Perl hackers have problems.
For all of the better-ness of other languages (and I really do like the syntax of those languages better in some ways), they still lack a CPAN. Some of them probably consider this a feature more than it is a bug, which may be the biggest bug of all.
Python and Ruby and their many friends fixed lots of problems with Perl syntax, and maybe even with Perl culture. But while they were busy throwing away the bad syntax Perl inherited from the real scripting languages, they left but the one feature that made Perl more than a novelty, which was not what we could do with it, but what others had already done.
Labels: perl, programming, python, ruby
// posted by David @ 11:30 AM 
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