A Tale of Two Languages (Perl)

Stomme_poes · July 27, 2010, 8:39am

Piers Cawley is a regular Perl and Ruby programmer who writes articles/blogs about various techy things (but a lot about Perl and Ruby).

He just posted a recent article, A Tale of Two Languages, about two different Perls one sees out in the wild: “Desperate Perl” and what he calls “Large Scale Perl” (others call this Modern Perl).

Excerpt:

piers:

If there’s one thing we’ve learned from [bad legacy Perl code], it’s that code is forever. When we were young, we did stupid things, but we grew up and everyone but our nearest and dearest (who have the good grace never to mention it) forgets that, once upon a time, we set fire to the living room rug while playing with matches/ate cornflakes with HP sauce/had a brief flirtation with the young Conservatives/had a brief flirtation with a young Conservative. We are forgiven.

Not Perl.

Perl’s reputation as a language that’s fine for writing short scripts, but which rapidly becomes unmaintainable once you try and write larger systems is bestowed upon it by people who looked at formmail.pl once and ran screaming into the night (a not unreasonable response).

But Desperate Perl isn’t the only language in the binary. Large scale programming with Perl uses, or should use, a different subset of the language.

Take a read!