Nokia to Port Perl to Mobiles 258
jonknee writes "MobileTracker notes that Nokia has made it clear that the Perl scripting language is coming to its popular Series 60 devices. This will be a huge boon to mobile software. Just look what happened to the web when CGI got popular. A time frame was not announced."
Pure nonsense (Score:5, Insightful)
This will be a huge boon to mobile software.
What? Please elaborate how perl can help in front-end applications for mobile phones.
Re:Pure nonsense (Score:2, Insightful)
I wont go into a flame/troll, but perl is not liked from some lower levels, and some high levels.
To assume that it will not do anything for -any- platform is just nonsense. It's proved it's worth anywhere where it matters, why wont it here?
When CGI got popular (Score:5, Insightful)
But mobile phones aren't static. The more modern ones can already run applications written in C/C++ or Java. Simply adding support for perl merely increases the number of people who could write code for them. The difference is nowhere near as great as CGI vs custom web server was.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying that this is a bad thing, by any means. I just don't see it having quite the same degree of impact as the poster.
Re:Pure nonsense (Score:0, Insightful)
Maybe we're living in different dimensions, but perl is the most obtuse and messy language ever. The fact someone can write a "hello world" application in a couple of lines in perl doesn't mean it's better than java or anything else. When a perl program grows beyond the 100-lines threshold it becomes easily unmanageable. Imagine the cost of writing - and maintaining - a game written in perl.
Nokia needs to focus on fixing their issues first (Score:5, Insightful)
JAPH SMS! (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:This is a great idea (Score:0, Insightful)
Good news, I suppose ... (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Nokia needs to focus on fixing their issues fir (Score:2, Insightful)
Forget the tutorials, yes the documentation is often not up to date, however, there are better places to learn midp programming than Nokia tutorials. There is *nothing* Nokia specific to midp programming!
Point some midp2.0 that works on any phone but a Nokia please? I haven't seen any!
Bugs in Nokia software? Certainly! Midp2.0 completely broken? No way!
Re:Pure nonsense (Score:5, Insightful)
Perl is dead. All the old perl geeks I know are presently unemployed, and doing their damndest to learn java, .NET or even PHP. Perl is probably fine for half arsed system scripts that don't exceed 50 lines or so, but it is a hindrance and an abomination to a professional development environment - most of which are tending towards python for their prototyping half-arsed scripting needs anyway.
Err, right...
Perl is used alot for CGI and for system admin stuff, but thats not really its target market (any more?). I'm part of a group thats got 30 or 40,000 lines of mission critical Perl running hardware that costs $10 a second whether its running or not. Down time is minimal.
Large Perl applications can be very maintainable so long as you have decent coding standards and actually use the features that are available in the language. Perl is powerful, just because the basics are easy to learn doesn't mean the heavy duty stuff isn't there. Most people that think themselves serious Perl hackers don't use a tenth of the languages features and aren't familiar with how to write decent, readable, object-orientated Perl.
Like any language you can't force people to write good code. You only have to look at the hideously slow half arsed Java applications that get churned out by people calling themselves programmers, but who know nothing about proper application design, to know that.
Al.How is java overkill? And how is this even big? (Score:5, Insightful)
Also, how exactly is java "overkill" for these devices? People talk about how a hello world app is 5 lines of code, but those few lines are constants that are going to be in any small app (i.e. public class Classname{ public static void main(String args[]){
If they're talking about running time, they're probably wrong too. Perl is interpreted, while java runs in a VM. I don't know if they use JIT on moble devices, but java will still be faster then Perl.
So how is java 'overkill'? This is certainly good news for perl buffs, but I don't know why the rest of us should care.
Re:This is a great idea (Score:5, Insightful)
CGI? (Score:3, Insightful)
Further, perl is not the only scripting language on the internet; furthermore i doubt it is the most popular. PHP, ASP, Java; all popular and equally efficient languages.
Re:How is java overkill? And how is this even big? (Score:4, Insightful)
CGI was the first easy way to program interactive web pages, as far as I know (it was a bit before my time), and perl was one of the languages you could use...
While you can use Perl to write CGI, Perl doesn't really have anything to do with CGI coding. You talk alot about CGI, not Perl, I don't see your point? CGI is totally irrelevant to mobile phones...?
Saying that Perl is used to write CGI scripts is like saying Java is used for writing web applets. Yes, you can write applets in Java, but most of the people I know don't.
Al.Re:How is java overkill? And how is this even big? (Score:5, Insightful)
Call me old-fashioned, but I like simple things to be simple. I've written about this before, but it seems like java wonks can't write a hello world with out also generating a "HelloWorld" class, and about 500 classes (not lines of code, but classes to go along with it. I'm getting pretty pissed off about it.
Not all problems require an OO solution. The majority of all problems don't require an OO solution. When you're doing something simple, the code should be simple as well. Why invent zillions of java classes and interfaces when 5 or 10 lines of perl code will do? IMO, this is the overkill that people speak of.
And, as we all know, complicated things are just layered simple things, so perl does well for complicated things, too. Very well, in fact.
Perl is interpreted,...
This is a common mispercption about perl. Perl is what mainframers used to call a "compile and go" language (I used to do all my MNF programming as compile and go, but then I had unlimited machine time). Perl is compiled down to an optree, and the the optree is run by the perl runtime (which is essentailly a VM, but the perl folks don't like to call it that). This all happens transparently. An interpeted language is quite a different thing.
I have my doubts. All the language performance comparisions I've read never take into account that perl programs are compiled just before they are run. I'd wager that if this was taken into account, then their performace would be fairly similar. (Of course, anyone can write inefficient programs in any language).
This is good news (Score:5, Insightful)
There's no denying that you can write really ugly code in Perl, but you can also write beautiul code in Perl. I think some of the people who knock Perl are confusing "undisciplined" with "not anal retentive". Perl was always based around the idea of serving the end rather than the means -- it's about where you're at, rather than how you got there. It does not impose a particular style on the programmer. Thus, for any given task, there could be many, many ways to accomplish it in Perl.
They're all right.
Some will be faster than others, some will use fewer resources than others, some will look prettier then others when viewed as source. But if you don't care enough about those things to mention them in the design spec, then they don't matter.
Now, you can have your fancy object-oriented stuff, but in many ways it's overkill. For instance, if you needed to write a programme involving geometry, you could create an Angle object which would have a value assumed to be in radians and properties for its sine, cosine, tangent and representation in degrees; a Distance object which would have properties for its representation in different measuring units; and assigning a value to any property would affect the object and therefore its other properties. It might be beautiful if you like the OO concept, but it's a bit overkill if you just want to find the missing side of a triangle.
And does a "disposable" programme -- one that you will run only a few times before forgetting it forever -- really need to look pretty anyway?
As for PHP, well, it really isn't much different from Perl -- apart from always needing to put brackets around function parameters, the fact that all variables start with a $ sign whether scalar, array or hash and there is no $_. {I happen to love $_. It goes nicely with the concept of an accumulator. If you never did any assembly language, you probably won't know what I'm talking about, though}. That is hardly surprising, because the original PHP was actually written in Perl to be like a kind of subset of Perl.
Also, one of my little niggles -- and I freely admit that this is just my own opinion -- is the inability to get on with any language that uses the plus sign as the string concatenation operator while letting you freely mix string and numberic variables. {*cough* ruby *cough*} I expect "2" + 2 to equal 4, not 22. Hell, if I have to do something to my variables before I can add them, that just nullified the advantage of having freely-mixable scalar types! It might as well be a strict-typed language and barf on an expression such as "2" + 2!
As for Python - well, it's not my cup of tea {I guess you like either Perl or Python} but other people seem to have written some pretty good stuff in it, so I shan't knock it.
Re:How is java overkill? And how is this even big? (Score:5, Insightful)
Happy? There's a little more text, but no more programming is required then the C version.
Happy??? What is there to be happy about that? Let's see what you really have there. You have a file that MUST be named HWorld.java. You have an HWorld class. You have the mandatory main function. Then a function call. At the end of the day, it's a whole lot of typing for a "Hello world" program.
In this simple example Perl rocks the socks off of Java.
Let's get a comparison on slow hardware to magnify latencies: celeron 500mhz, 128 megs RAM.
Recent Java (1.4.1_02)
javac compilation of HWorld: 10 seconds
java execution of HWorld: 1 second
size of Hworld.class: 417 bytes
Recent Perl (5.8.2)
perl compilation:
perl compilation & execution: 0.027
size of hworld.pl: 39 bytes
Come again as to what exactly java is better at? It takes more Java to do the same thing in Perl, and no offense, the code you mentioned isn't exactly a joy to read (90% of it is required filler/overhead). Some might call that OVERKILL.
Re:Pure nonsense (Score:3, Insightful)
If your hardware is so expensive...
Why are people assuming by hardware I meant the computers? The computers control stuff, this is also hardware? Its just rather hard to use without the computers... *scratch head*
Al.Are we really helping cell technology here? (Score:2, Insightful)
- My calls still get cut off.
- "Can you here me now?" is still the most widely spoken phrase among all cell phone conversations.
It seems people's standards of what is considered an acceptable, workable device is slowly deteriorating since musical ring tones, solitaire and programming languages seem to excite consumers of the 21st century more than getting something to function properly.