[ILUG-Social] Perl is a pool language

[Justin Mason]

Joe Desbonnet said:

> Perl is a poor choice of language for all but the smallest projects IMHO.
> Good for small write-only scripts. Poor for application development. (I know
> because I've used it for this type of stuff).  

Perl is only a poor language for large-scale projects, if it's written in
a small-scale way, IMHO.

If you write perl using:

	* modules in an OO way
	* "use strict"
	* "use vars" and "my $foo" to declare variables
	* no stupid perl tricks ;)

then you've got a perfectly maintainable chunk of OO code, amenable to
refactoring techniques and so on, just like yer latest and trendiest Java
or C++ -- only more maintainable -- ie. open a file in 1 line instead of 5
or 6 ;).

I'm using it for app development on 2 fairly large-scale apps --
http://webmake.taint.org/ (6.1k lines of code) and http://sitescooper.org/
(11.9 kloc) -- and it's great, and in my experience, easier to add
features to and maintain than C++ or Java.

> (This is partially intended as a flame bait 'cause I'd like to debate this
> one :-)

no shit ;)

--j.