Nokia to Port Perl to Mobiles

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."

Next mobile

[Alioth]

I was thinking of getting a Sony Ericcson phone, but if the Nokia will have a Perl port available, I might wait a bit longer before getting a replacement for my existing one :-)

This is a great idea

[cervo]

the current choices (C++, Java) are overkill for a lot of applications

They are right, for ripping info off of web pages and stuff you just can't compare C++ and Java to Perl because of the overhead, kudos. Now you can make perl scripts to provide real time quotes off of various websites very quickly, this is great news.

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[account_deleted]

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Re:Next mobile

[Alioth]

Big question - does it have an SSH client? That would be a killer app for me, assuming latencies on GPRS are reasonable.

It goes without saying that it's bound to have an IRC client :-)

Re:Pure nonsense

[gl4ss]

it will on depend on what they will make available on it, some extensions to create dialogs and stuff would make creating simple software for it easier, a lot easier to start doing simple software for it at least.

j2me can't access the filesystem and stuff like that directly, so that limits a lot what you can do with j2me java.

and symbian c++ isn't that straightforward to pick up and the sdk isn't that hot either(grr.. i wish i had some GOOD book on it, learning it as i go at the moment), even though that's the way to do powerful applications and seems to have some logic once you 'get in it'. j2me on the other hand was very easy to pick up.

so it would be very nice to have some light(to write) scripting language that could access the whole hardware(for doing apps that do periodical file uploads, analyze some files or whatever).

Language Thrashing

[fm6]

Nokia seems to be thrashing around for better language support. They started with the Symbian SDK, which uses Visual C++ as an IDE. Then there was Java, which traditionally has used Vi or EMACS as a sort of IDE. Then they seem to have decided that they needed better IDEs, so they made expensive deals with Borland's C++ and Java business units. (These BUs are part of one small company, but in a very real sense they're direct competitors.) Now they seem to think that a good scripting language is the missing link.

I was at Borland when the C++ effort started scaling up, and there was a lot of enthusiasm among people who thought that there was going to be a huge demand for personal device apps. Obviously there's the same feeling at Nokia, only more so. I suspect that this market is not living up to expectation -- the only apps that generate any buzz are phonecams and games, and there's only so much market for those. Nokia seems to think that there'd be more cool apps if there were more and better development tools. I really doubt that this is the problem.

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[account_deleted]

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Re:Now I need an external keyboard

[Anonymous Coward]

Check out their model 6800 with the flip open keyboard.

http://www.nokiausa.com/phones/6800

For managing contacts/making notes and calendaring, their keyboard is a great feature. I really dont miss old style data entry ala my old startac.

Re:Next mobile

[ttj]

An SSH client for a mobile phone would indeed be nice, but I personally wouldn't want to do massive amounts of administrative work on the so called keyboard of a mobile phone. Writing SMS messages is awkward enough already even though it has the predictive text feature on it. Think of what it would be like to enter line after line of cryptic *nix commands on it.

I will, however, admit that it would be an easy way to brag about your uptime amidst your friends without the need to have physical access to the computer.

Re:This is good news

[tcopeland]

> {*cough* ruby *cough*} I expect "2" + 2
> to equal 4, not 22

Hm. In Ruby that'll raise an exception:

irb(main):001:0> "2" + 2
TypeError: cannot convert Fixnum into String
from (irb):1:in `+'
from (irb):1
irb(main):002:0>

But of course, you could do:

irb(main):002:0> "2" + 2.to_s
=> "22"

or

irb(main):003:0> "2".to_i + 2
=> 4
irb(main):004:0>

to get whatever result you want.

Re:Pure nonsense

[110010001000]

"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"

That is over $315 million dollars a year in costs. What system on the planet costs that much to run per year?

Thanks

Re:Language Thrashing

[Corvus9]

Nokia seems to think that there'd be more cool apps if there were more and better development tools. I really doubt that this is the problem.

I don't know if it's "the" problem, but it certainly is a large part of the problem.

I had the misfortune to work on a USB sync application for a Symbian device, and the development tools are a throwback to the early 1970s. Writing a simple "Hello World" application for Symbian requires hundreds of lines of C++, MMC, IDL, and makefile text.

You mention VC++ as the IDE. Yes, we used the VC++ text editor, but to actually compile a Symbian application requires a specially-customized gcc with no debugger support, and a half-dozen command-line apps with no documentation which have to be customized for every target platform. I'm in hell! I'm in HELL!!!

Think I'm making this up? Check out Russell Beattie's blog [russellbeattie.com]. This guy is one of the biggest Symbian boosters on the planet, and even he admits the situation is untenable.

Re:Pure nonsense - no pure BS

[Camel Pilot]

You should know better than to repy to an AC.

However let me chime in also, were I work we just released a web based control system that monitors and controls a large remote vessel for the Navy. The system continuously monitors vessel roll, pitch, ballast levels, mooring tensions, intrusion detection, etc.

This vessel is research platform is unattended for long periods of time. If an alarm condition is encountered the system starts a generator fires up a long haul net connection and sends data and images and dispatches alarm e-mails and phone messages.

I think we can use the term "mission critical" for this application. It is written with Perl and uses Apache sitting on top of Linux.

Oh and by the way we got to do this job because of a similar successful system that monitors and provide critical control for a research submersible.

We have about 15k lines of code libraries that are well written, modular and easy to maintain. Perl's facilities promote packaging your design into small self-contained objects and features like built in (and fast) reg exp, symbolic references, tie, fast (near C like) I/O, etc are fantastic tools that speed development.

Re:Pure nonsense

[aallan]

That is over $315 million dollars a year in costs. What system on the planet costs that much to run per year?

Big budget, big science. Trust me $315 million isn't really that much money.

Al.

Re:This is good news

[CatGrep]

And does a "disposable" programme -- one that you will run only a few times before forgetting it forever -- really need to look pretty anyway?

Maybe not, but what if you do decide that you need it again 6 months later with some slight modifications you might not be able to figure out what your 'disposable' program was doing.

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.

Well, you're only half right. The '+' sign can indeed be used for string concatenation in Ruby, however you can't freely mix string and numeric variables:

irb(main):001:0> 2+"2"
TypeError: String can't be coerced into Fixnum
from (irb):1:in `+'
from (irb):1

So you either need to do (if you want a numeric result):
irb(main):005:0> 2+"2".to_i
=> 4

Or:
irb(main):011:0* 2.to_s+"2"
=> "22" ...to get the answer you find annoying.

'+' seems to make sense as a string concatenation operator. Isn't Perl6 planning to use '~' -that's intuitive.

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!

I suppose you could always redefine the '+' operator in both the String and Fixnum classes to act like it does in Perl (ie. do the automatic conversion), but that probably wouldn't be a good idea. It's not that big of a deal to do the conversion between String and Fixnum.

Just Rumours?

[wehe]

I have tried to confirm this posting at the news section of NOKIA [nokia.com]. As far as I could see there is no official news about Perl on NOKIAs phones. Perhaps we have to wait for the recently announced mobile Linux cell phones [tuxmobil.org].

Re:Pure nonsense

[mefus]

I smell a Linux Magazine article, here.

Have you given it some thought?

Re:This is a great idea

[Decaff]

Its not the JVM: VMs are small things that load in fractions of a second. Its the class libraries. Many of the standard class libraries supplied with VMs (such as the Swing GUI) have definitely been incompetently coded in terms of load speed, and are being extensively recoded because of this.

Re:Pure nonsense

[gl4ss]

a lot of midp's being limited is so that you can trust it to not screw your phone completely up, like an applet(so you can now run any midlet without fearing too much. without *having* to trust anyone). if you gave it filesystem access you would lose that aspect. though people seem to trust .sis files found from god knows where..

those extensions aren't that hot(when it comes to truly extending midp) and midp itself is lacking in when it comes to writing certain type of apps(like some app that would require a lowlevel ui canvas mixed with text input).

though, nokia may have their motives of their own for porting perl(internal use..).