The Year in Scripting Languages 248
Mitchell writes "People from several language communities came together to create a
joint year-in-review
for Lua, Perl, Python, Ruby, and Tcl."
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The Year in Scripting Languages
Related Links Top of the: day, week, month.
Whoever dies with the most toys wins.
What about... (Score:4, Funny)
Re:What about... (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:What about... (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:What about... (Score:2)
Re:What about... (Score:2)
batch:sh::wsh:perl (Score:2, Informative)
Incorrect. CMD/Batch scripting is still alive and well, and much more powerful in its cmd.exe "cmd scripting" form than it ever was in the DOS "batch scripting" days. Batch/CMD is to sh as WSH is to perl (especially since you can use perl to write WSH code -- WSH is not a language, but a framework that can support many languages).
From the "IP all over you" department (Score:2)
And speaking of #1, I was reading the article out to my business partners, who heard me say "Joint Urine Review".
They began wondering exactly when programmers were getting drug-tested?
Solomon
Re:What about... (Score:3, Interesting)
DOS scripting is no longer Microsoft's preferred scripting feature.
Windows batch files are a holdover from DOS. DOS as we know it originally ran on IBM PCs and early descendants, which were cheap, slow, 16-bit, underfeatured toy computers. At that same time, Unix was running on expensive, fast, 32-bit, featurful computers. Before that, Unix did run on 16-bit computers (various submodels of PDP-11), but PDP-11s were certainly more expensive and more featureful than 8086- and 80286-based PCs, and PDPs were most definitely not toys.
The point? Unix scripting was better than DOS scripting. Windows evolved from DOS, and as a result it got DOS's scripting capabilities. That evolution is only now reaching the stage where it can be said with any regularity that Windows is evolving from itself rather than from DOS. Win2K and (maybe) WinNT4 were the first incarnations of Windows with this property. It is a very slow process.
What we see now is Windows evolving its own scripting engines. I'm not savvy about some of these things, but I do know that there are VBScript or Windows Scripting Host for automating things in the OS, and VBA for scripting inside individual apps like Excel or Access. Granted, these are all based on VB, which is lacking when compared to Java or C++, but these are quite well-suited for scripting in a Windows environment.
Just yesterday, for example, I wrote a simple Windows script that renames files in a directory tree by doing regular expression search and replace. This clearly represents an improvement over the legacy DOS scripting capabilities.
Re:Uhh... (Score:2)
Next year... Invite PHP (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Next year... Invite PHP (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Next year... Invite PHP (Score:2)
Why would you have to invite ASP? Just because you're asking Cinderella to the ball, doesn't mean you have to ask her ugly sisters as well.
Re:Next year... Invite PHP (Score:2)
One important addition to perl (Score:3, Interesting)
From the website: "PerlQt-3 is Ashley Winters' full featured object oriented interface to Trolltech's C++ Qt toolkit v3.0. It is based on the SMOKE library, a language independent low-level wrapper generated from Qt headers by Richard Dale's kalyptus thanks to David Faure's module".
Another thing that's nice is that "All Qt classes are accessed through the prefix Qt::, which replaces the initial Q of Qt classes. When browsing the Qt documentation, you simply need to change the name of classes so that QFoo reads Qt::Foo". So, essentialy the API is similar to QT with reduces the learning curve quite a bit.
Missing (Score:4, Interesting)
Not really ports to the platform itself, but great productivity boosters regardless. I've used VisualPython with VS.NET 1.0 and it rocks.
Where is my... (Score:3, Interesting)
This [php.net] report shows how it is growing.
Re:Where is my... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Where is my... (Score:2)
But as far I can see, they are trying hard [php.net] to make it usable [php.net] as scripting language.
Re:Where is my... (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Where is my... (Score:2)
I was going to comment on this too, then saw you already had
PHP is also for batch pre-processing (Score:3, Insightful)
PHP now has a batch mode intended for preprocessing. That is, periodically generating static HTML from PHP pages.
Re:Where is my... (Score:2, Informative)
I prefer PHP as a scripting language for many tasks, including anything involving database access. People have written complex socket applications in PHP such as HTTP servers and HTTP proxies, simple sysadmin utilities, and everything in between. In fact, many C programmers seem to prefer PHP as a scripting language due to its C-like syntax and clean design.
PHP and Perl are equivalent in my mind in terms of what can be accomplished. If you are comfortable with the syntax of one, there is no pressing need to learn the other. If you need a shell script, PHP and Perl both work. If you are developing for the Web, PHP and mod_perl do the job. PHP is not limited to Apache, however, which is one of the many reasons it has been more widely adopted in the Web development community.
I have found that those who think PHP is only useful for Web application development are the same people who think Perl is only useful for shell scripting. See if the mod_perl community agrees with that.
Re:Where is my... (Score:2, Interesting)
'... due to its C-like syntax and clean design.'
PHP only slightly resembles C (it goes off from C syntax in wild tangents all over the place), and it's not exactly what I'd call cleanly designed. For example, here's a few string functions:
str_replace
strlen
sprintf
split
Let's not get into how individual PHP commands have different orders for their parameters even when they do the same thing... (for example, split() takes delimiter first, string second, while strrchr() takes string first, delimiter second. Don't even get me started on how useless PHP's string functions are in general - they all return strings instead of indexes!
Re:Where is my... (Score:5, Informative)
For example, after your attempt to say that PHP only slightly resembles C, you try to point out weaknesses in PHP by mentioning functions that are direct equivalents of C functions (strlen, strchr, sprintf, etc.). Make up your mind.
Also, since it seems you suggest otherwise, there is a good reason why not every string manipulating function begins with str_. Do you think C should have used str_printf() and str_sprintf()? How about PHP's functions crypt(), echo(), explode(), md5(), trim(), soundex(), etc. Should these all be renamed? Bill Gates may agree with you, but I doubt you will find many open source developers who do.
In case it is helpful, strchr() and split() do not do the same thing. It sounds like you're heading for trouble there.
I guess my point is that your inexperience is not a valid complaint against PHP. Yes, it is not the perfect language, but it happens to work well for a lot of people. If you want to bash it, at least use valid reasons (which there are plenty) such as how mod_php is a content generation module and therefore unable to interact with other request phases within Apache (though I think this is being remedied in the apache_hooks API). Or, point to a benchmark showing how Perl parses large text files 20% faster in some cases. Or, show how Python's OO model is more advanced.
Sorry if this post comes off a bit strong, but I tire of seeing hollow rhetoric.
Re:Where is my... (Score:2)
Re:Where is my... (Score:2)
Re:Where is my... (Score:2, Informative)
> sense that those others are.
Actually, it is.
#!
Re:Where is my... (Score:2)
Ahem? [php.net]
Re:Where is my... (Score:2)
PHP 2003 year-in-review (Score:3, Informative)
BTW, PHP news is available in RDF format as a Slashbox. Go to your Slashdot "preferences" to add.
As for Language wars, no language is better, it's just a better tool for a particular job.
I try to only use a few scripting languages (Score:5, Informative)
The reason is simple: I need to use several non-scripting languages (Java, Smalltalk, etc.) and remembering the language syntax and class libraries for more than 4 or 5 programming languages is a hassle.
BTW, scripting languages are not necessarily horribly inefficient anymore.
A little off topic, but I compared the resources used for a small web app on the following platforms:
- Java servlets/JSPs - minimum memory footprint is about 75 megabytes
- Smalltalk servlets - mimimum memory footprint is about 20 megabytes
- Python Zope - minimum memory foortprint is about 11 megabytes
In all three cases, the server processes use negligible CPU time after startup (mostly waiting with select).Anyway, for lots of applications, Python is fast enough - no need for high performance compilers like Common Lisp, C++, Smalltalk, etc.
-Mark
Python best fits my needs (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Python best fits my needs (Score:2)
Re:I try to only use a few scripting languages (Score:2)
Re:I try to only use a few scripting languages (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:I try to only use a few scripting languages (Score:5, Informative)
Just a few days ago, the "Minimalist Python" project was announced. Its goal is to two fold: reduce the distribution to a central core and to re-write as much of it as possible in Python. By doing so, and by including Psyco the Python specializing compiler [sourceforge.net] , the folks working on the Minimalist distribution hope to have a Python that outperforms C (initial tests show that Python+Psyco does outperform C code in many cases). I've used Psyco a bit, and it is a marvel. The idea of a Python compiler, written in Python, becomes possible, and has recently been discussed quite actively on comp.lang.python.
Even with the speed improvements, the Real Benefit(tm) of Python is in not saving machine time, it's in saving my time as a developer, because I'm far, far more expensive to employ than a server.
Re:I try to only use a few scripting languages (Score:2)
Do you have a link with more info about "Minimalist Python"? Google does not show anything related to such a project.
Re:I try to only use a few scripting languages (Score:4, Insightful)
There isn't much yet beyond a mailing list (here [codespeak.net]) and a lot of discussion on c.l.p, but the folks involved are notable Python contributors. I have no doubt the project will be successful.
Re:I try to only use a few scripting languages (Score:2)
I fear that products like zope will suffer in the long run, because python server apps just don't scale as well as java apps. Hacks like binding the server process to one cpu and instead spawn multiple processes (each bound to their own cpu) are not the be all and end all of server programming, thei are - well - hacks. And without that binding, the interpreter process will bounce around between cpus and thrash the cache.
Yes, it's not much of a real concern today, and won't be for the majority of users for a long time, but saying the GIL doesn't matter at all is self-delusion - and that assessement is heard everytime someone asks about the GIL.
Re:I try to only use a few scripting languages (Score:2)
In the short term, there are plenty of ways around it -- the easiest being to move some code to a separate instance of Python and then use an RPC mechanism for communication. It's simple and effective.
In the long run, I can't imagine that the GIL will be in Python 3.0. That's a ways away yet, of course, but I'd be very surprised to see it make it that far.
Re:I try to only use a few scripting languages (Score:2, Funny)
Exiting to Ruby?
Re:I try to only use a few scripting languages (Score:2)
I know about how it's full of more "real" OO than Python, but what else that is practical?
DISCLAIMER: I'm a Smalltalk programmer, and also use Perl when it's applicable. Ruby, which is referred to as (Smalltalk + Perl) / 2 in a number of places, doesn't really rub me right. Python isn't really what I want to use usually either, but it just seems a bit more... cohesive to me in the work I've done. To each her own.
Re:I try to only use a few scripting languages (Score:2)
And for those it's not, it's easy enough to write your own extensions in C/C++.
Also, seeing how you mentioned zope, ZODB and ZEO (the coolest parts of zope, IMHO) are available standalone. BTW, if you're looking for low resource consumption, powerful, python web goodness, give Quixote a look.
Re:I try to only use a few scripting languages (Score:2)
There was a time when Python was used because it was different than the other options- different than perl and Smalltalk. But so many people are just kind of hacking onto Python all the great features of Smalltalk that have been polished and matured over the last 30 years... Object databases, persistency, an actually object-based system, cutting edge virtual machine/bytecode/cross-platform technology among other things. I guess Python's syntax resembles C/C++/Java quite a bit more than Smalltalk does, and that backwards comabilitibility of mind does make a big difference to a lot of people.
Re:I try to only use a few scripting languages (Score:2)
Re:I try to only use a few scripting languages (Score:2)
Smalltalk servlets - mimimum memory footprint is about 20 megabytes
Ouch! What system are you using for that? Sure, that's a lot better than Java, but 20 MB of a footprint is a lot more than it has to be for Smalltalk.
I am not running a huge setup, but the small group of servlets I have running on my own machine for my personal access has a running RAM footprint of about 3-5 MB, serving regular static web data, webmail-esque access to my email collection (via a custom module I wrote), a web-based Smalltalk class browser and workspace (for doing scripting and such under some circumstances), some XML-RPC methods (again for my personal use) and a Wiki all under ComSwiki and Comanche running in Squeak Smalltalk.
Granted, I also have a Smalltalk image for this that has been stripped down to only what is needed for the servlet/web setup. One could the default Squeak image, load in Comanche and get a 20 MB footprint- but then again, you'd have the source and binary loaded into RAM for a ton of stuff that isn't related to serving dynamic and static data. A web browser, a complete IDE, debuggers, inspectors, irc clients, email reader, GUI designer among oodles and oodles of other stuff.
But I'm guessing you're not using an-worked Squeak image for doing servlets- you're probably using VisualWorks and VisualWave.
I personally use Smalltalk because you can get realworld performance that is adequate (usually faster than Python, but Python is fast enough for me too) and development time that is really outstanding.
That said, Smalltalk isn't right for everyone, and I'm not trying to convince you to quit using VisualWorks or VisualAge (or whatever Smalltalk dialect you're using) and switch to Squeak, I just am a Smalltalk user with experience in some web apps.
Silly Rabbit (Score:4, Funny)
Script reviews and naked girls [google.com].
Or try Pajonet.com [pajonet.com]
Re:Silly Rabbit (Score:2, Funny)
Python to become dominate cross platform language (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Python to become dominate cross platform langua (Score:3, Interesting)
It's a complete bitch to debug your programs when the wxWindows library goes berserk, and it does, way too often.
Btw, I think there should be no GUI toolkit at all in Python as default.
Re:Python to become dominate cross platform langua (Score:2)
Tcl? (Score:2, Insightful)
What a hideous language that is.. "Expect" is pretty cool but it gets lost under tcl sillyness.
Has anybody fixed the whitespace/quoting bogosity in that language? Can you say x++ instead of [incr x] yet?
Perl or Ruby or death!
Re:Tcl? (Score:3, Interesting)
and please do not put your own opionion as the opinion of the masses.
People who think in commands and strings choose TCL!
Re:Tcl? (Score:2, Informative)
Well, my big project was started before Tcl/Tk had a text widget, and I think before NCSA Mosaic was written, but yes, Tcl is what I use for anything new that needs a GUI or is otherwise beyond the capabilities of a short Bourne-shell script.
(The main thing I've written is an editor, which you can find along with a bunch of other stuff here [aq.org]. Please don't judge Tcl based on what I do with it in my spare time, though; there are loads of better-maintained and more ambitious Tcl projects out there.)
Well, the thing I like about Tcl is it's utterly fanatical self-consistency and simplicity. It's about the diametric opposite of Perl (especially pre-Perl5 Perl. Larry Wall wrote "I wanted Perl to work smoothly in the way that natural languages work smoothly, not in the way that mathematics works smoothly." Tcl works smoothly in the way that mathematics works smoothly. It's a very small, very consistent language, and that means you can keep all of it in your head even as a casual user. It's learning curve comes mainly from being simpler than other languages a new Tcl programmer may be familiar with. Yes, that means you can't write DeCSS in half a line of punctuation characters the way you can with some languages
Honestly, asking why you can't increment a variable by appending ++ to it in Tcl is like asking why you can't indicate the object of a verb by changing a final -us to -um in English instead of having to put the words in a particular order, or why you can't "use Getopt::Std;" in Lisp, or why you can't just push the button for the right floor in a car the way you can in an elevator.
Tcl and Perl are both excellent languages, but they appeal to very different kinds of people. (I haven't used it much, but from what I've seen Python is somewhere in the middle - a lot of Tcl's consistency, but also a lot of syntax compared to Tcl, which lets you express things somewhat more tersely.)
Tcl is also great at introspection, which makes it easy to write code that manipulates code.
Tcl was originally designed as an embedded extension language, to be added on to applications in $COMPILED_LANGUAGE to provide scriptability - it was originally targetted to replace things like sendmail.cf,
I actually wish that Tcl had had more success in its original intended niche; since it's a pain to have to learn a new incomplete and clunky mini-language with every new application you want to configure or script - and then not have them be able to talk to each other. If Guile or whatever becomes a bit more ubiquitous for that purpose I'll learn it and be content, I suppose, but I guess everybody who writes a new app wants to write a new language to go along with it rather than steal somebody else's.
No Bourne? (Score:5, Insightful)
being developed anymore?
I'm a big fan of Python, but for every Python
script I write, I write dozens that start out
#!/bin/sh.
It may not be sexy, but it's maintainable (every
admin knows it), portable (any system that has
sh or bash), and dirt simple to write.
or awk (Score:4, Interesting)
you'll see it here used like
wget -O - http://domain/info.html | awk -f proc.awk | mysql -u news newsdb
rc shell [bell-labs.com] and it's unix implmentation [le.ac.uk]
Re:or awk (Score:2)
Re:or awk (Score:2)
[1] Although it's not genomics or anything, rather informatics and computer science applied to ecology.
Re:or awk (Score:2)
here's a Lisp implementation [cmu.edu] in awk.
While we're on the subject of Lisp... well, those of you who know, know. The others might learn one day.
Re:No Bourne? (Score:2)
Who is winning?: Let the porn industry decide! (Score:5, Funny)
- php [google.com] - 1.1 million hits
- perl [google.com] - 56,200 hits
- lua [google.com] - 478 hits
- python [google.com] - 27,800
- ruby [google.com] - 54,400 hits
- tcl [google.com] - 4,680 hits
And the winner is: PHP by a landslide!--naked [slashdot.org]
Re:Who is winning?: Let the porn industry decide! (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Who is winning?: Let the porn industry decide! (Score:3, Funny)
Perl Data Language for scientific work (Score:5, Informative)
Perl Data Language (http://pdl.perl.org [perl.org]) is a set of C and FORTRAN bindings that make perl into a complete vectorized scientific-computing language that's useful for big tasks like inverting 1000x1000 matrices or fluid-dynamic simulation, but that can also be used interactively to work with image and spectral data.
That's neat because interactive data analysis is a pretty small niche market with a few proprietary (and, IMHO, seriously broken) languages dominating. With PDL, I can give fresh science data to high school students, straight from the spacecraft. Their L337 gaming machines are plenty powerful enough to run the tools they need, and perl is pretty much universal.
Re:Perl Data Language for scientific work (Score:2)
Re:Perl Data Language for scientific work (Score:3, Informative)
PDL has really excellent dimensional manipulation and slicing; and the PGPLOT output is very nice. For me, the main advantage over python is that, well, it's just perl -- so you have access to the whole CPAN library for (e.g.) database I/O, units conversion, uu{en|de}coding, and whatnot.
Re:Perl Data Language for scientific work (Score:2)
It's probably not worthwhile to try to replace the bulk of the analysis software that already exists with PDL -- but on the other hand, I've in general had better luck working in PDL than trying to get third-party freeware to work in (e.g.) IDL.
Re:There is just better languages, though (Score:2)
K certainly looks interesting, tho'.
Lua compared to Guile? (Score:2)
Re:Lua compared to Guile? (Score:3, Interesting)
My biggest complaints are with the pascal-style syntax: using begin
Re:Lua compared to Guile? (Score:2, Funny)
Sorry but I don't know anything about "Lua." Maybe she (he?) was released as part of Super Streetfighter 2 or hyper-alpha-streetfighter 2 or some version that I never played.
LUA getting some attention... (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:LUA getting some attention... (Score:2)
Then again, I'm got a big soft-spot in my heart for NewtonScript, after which Lua was modeled.
Brian W. Kernighan's scripting language shootout (Score:5, Informative)
Although K [kx.com] really isn't a scripting langauge (neither is C), results [kx.com] were done for it, too (being faster and having less code). There is also a shallow introduction [kuro5hin.org] to K on Kuro5hin.org.
Rexx has no equal. (Score:3, Funny)
The programming language Rexx runs great as Regina on Linux/UNIX/NT, or Rexx under OS2 Warp or NT is cross platform with minimal changes.
Rexx http://www2.hursley.ibm.com/rexx/
Regina http://regina-rexx.sourceforge.net/
Can your scripting language do this out of the box:
-Wargames
Powers of 2:
say 2**100
1267650600228229401496703205376
say 2**150
14272476927059598810582859694494951363827
Re:Rexx has no equal. (Score:2)
Can Rexx do that? Just out of curiousity. Smalltalk can, a lot of Lisps can, but I'd love to add other languages to the list.
Ruby can... (Score:3, Funny)
2**1000
1071508607186267320948425049060001810561404811
Or when you say that 'Rexx has no equal' do you mean that you can't check for equality in Rexx?
Ferite (Score:2, Informative)
They barely mentioned Parrot... (Score:4, Informative)
Seriously though. They barely mentioned Parrot and Parrot is coming along very nicely I think. Even with a Java to Parrot Bytecode program, Brainfuck, Jako, Befunge-93, cola, forth, miniperl, ook, (non-final) perl6 interpreters/compilers, as well as python, ruby and scheme interpreters/compilers coming. Of course it's not finished, so not all of the languages are either, but hey, it's getting there, and damn fast. There's even a Parrot Assembly Lange.
Parrot is definately not Perl6. It's much more. It's like java, but open source, and independent of Languages. They're hoping to have it compile on as many platforms as perl does now, unlike Java which is Windows, Mac, Linux, and some PDAs, end of story.
So everyone check it out and throw some patches in too! Of course, the only support I've given so far is moral support.
VBScript (Score:3, Informative)
Re:VBScript (Score:2)
I may be incorrect, but can you not also use JavaScript to interface with ASP?
Re:VBScript (Score:2)
Re:VBScript (Score:2)
Re:TCL????? (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:TCL????? (Score:5, Informative)
TCLs claim to fame is its small memory use. TCL can be included as a command interpreter in other programs easily and without much bloat. There are more embedded TCL applications than any one person knows about; both in hardware and software. TCL was also first with UTF-8 support in strings, around 1998 or before, way before Perl, so there are probably more TCL CGI scripts overseas than most English users think.
As for benchmarks, TCL is getting faster [mini.net], with a huge jump from v7 to v8 and about a 25% improvement from 8.0 to 8.4a3 (scroll down to bottom of linked page.)
Re:TCL????? (Score:2, Interesting)
I guess if I used it more it'd come easier, but I just never had the need nor desire to learn beyond what was required to get an A in the course I was taking.
Of course, there are those who believe that the more cryptic and confusing their code is, the more adept a coder it makes them; "credibility through obscurity". I never bought into that.
Re:TCL????? (Score:2)
think different!
It's much easier for me to think in terms
of commands , their arguments and strings
than in terms of functions and procedures.
I cannot really understand Perl code,
but TCL is easy for me.
Cryptic things like $_ in perl and enormous contexts are also really confusing.
In python I was astonished by the
requrement of strict tabbing. I am not a precious person and I found this requirement hard. But in other ways Python is great language, having a lot of libraries.
One word: Scotty (Score:2, Insightful)
No other comes close.
Seriously, tcl isn't that bad a language once
you get used to it. You get lists and associative
arrays and namespaces and pretty high-level libraries (one line TCP socket server setup).
Plus doing event-driven stuff is **REALLY* easy.
The event-handling is built in.
Having to do math in expr is a pain.
Plus pretty good cross-platform capability.
-- ac at work
Re:TCL????? (Score:2, Informative)
1) Its implementation is beautiful. The C code is some of the cleanest and most pleasant that I've ever had the pleasure to read.
2) The language itself is quite comprehensible, even to beginners. Python is maybe a tad easier, but Tcl is certainly not tough to pick up.
3) You can write control structures *in* Tcl. For example, even though the language doesn't have 'do
4) Lots of neat stuff in the implementation, like the event loop.
5) It's extremely easy to embed and extend. It makes it incredibly easy to make your application scriptable. Also, it's not that big (although larger than Lua, for sure), so it won't bloat your app too much.
Re:TCL????? (Score:3, Insightful)
I mean, going from "function(param1, param2)" to "function param1 param2" can't be all *that* hard.
Re:TCL????? (Score:3, Interesting)
Incidentally, for those 5 years, NBC has been using Tcl in mission critical, real time applications to stream video [usenix.org] to affiliates across the country.
I've been using tDOM [mini.net] lately, a Tcl interface to the DOM. It is, quite simply, the fastest XML parser I have found.
Re:TCL????? (Score:2)
Useless sarcasm aside, no it did not. It was so nasty that my development lab moved completely away from it and I gave it only passing thought, being more concerned with learning a language or 3 that might be recognized on a resume at more places besides just NBC. It might have a small active following, but Perl/PHP and various cousins are much more active, and with Perl/Tk why bother dealing with Tcl syntax any more?
Re:TCL????? (Score:2)
Try a better troll next time. Dislike my post? Suck it, AC.
Re:TCL????? (Score:2, Insightful)
Yes. For one, OpenACS toolkit [openacs.org] (and a lot of on-line communities built on it) uses it. TCL is a native language of AOLServer [aolserver.com].
Re:IN SOVIET RUSSIA... (Score:2, Funny)
Nice try, but as I understand the form, you need to avoid the article "the" [insovietrussia.com] or Smirnoff will never option your screenplay. For example:
In Soviet Russia, article omits you!
Moderators: I am not trying to encourage the form, other than trying to bring it to a bearable levels of authenticity.
Note to moderators (Score:2)
A few clues to its troll content:
While I wouldn't use its to code the new Doom (VB would be a better choice)
Perl lacks a graphics library of any kind.
A few replies (Score:4, Informative)
After about a day I had an excellent understanding of both PHP and SQL.
I don't know PHP but you don't have an excellent understanding of SQL in one day. Its not a that hard but ain't that easy either. Rather what is probably true is that you have an excellent understanding of how to write SQL to get information from the types of simple database with simple underlying business rules.
The modern SQL spec runs 2000 pages you don't have an excellent understanding of 2% of that in one day.
This is because Perl isn't OO (so you can't create Node classes, for example, usefull in a linked list) and because it lacks pointers.
I don't know what you are talking about. If X is a type of object then X's are passed around as pointers (see bless). Arrays in Perl are linked lists so an array of X's is a linked list, that's why you use things like push, pop, shift, etc... on arrays in Perl.
As for graphics Perl libraries support a wide range of graphics formats.
There are some other things like your comments about the regex engine that I highly doubt. No regex engine has had the time, attention and work of Perl's, Its not Perl's strong suit because of some sort of myth, for example Perl's grep has outperformed the native grep on Solaris. My guess is that the failure lies with you on this one.
Re:Tcl has already seen it's day... (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Programming down the toilet... (Score:3, Informative)
Re:PHP is great and so is Smalltalk. (Score:2)
That said, you can sure use Perl and its friends for real apps, even though it can get a bit awkward compared to using a language designed for being general purpose like Smalltalk, Common Lisp or even (eww) Java.