Re: Perl versus other scripting language

Nath, Alok (STSD) wrote:

Hi Perlers !
In my project we are using lot of scripts (for various job launching activities )some written in bash, some in perl.It's completely chaos
and not organized.

Now we want to revamp the whole scripting framework using some
high level scripting languages like perl, python, ruby etc.

I wanted to use perl, but my other teammates wants to use either
python or ruby.They say perl is not readable and hence difficult
to maintain.

I am comfortable using perl but not sure about ruby and python what they offer.

Can somebody throw your opinion please ?

Hi Alok

People will get very heated about which language is the 'best', and the
choice is much like picking the best football team. These are some pragmatic
points that come to mind:

- The readability of Perl, like any other language, depends on the programmer.
It is not an inherently unreadable language, but a large part of the community
feel the need to condense an algorithm into 'one-liners' which I find immensely
irritating. COBOL was a language designed to be transparently readable but
failed just because software is, by its nature, complex and difficult.

- Whichever language you choose, existing staff will be comfortable with it
within a couple of months (unless they feel so strongly about the choice
that they distance themselves and fail to get any experience).

- New staff can be recruited who have experience with the language of choice,
although I believe you are likely to find more Perl or Python programmers than
Ruby ones.

- The community support for Perl is much better than any other language.

- You could add Lua to the list. But then remove it - it's awful.

I hope this helps a little,

Rob
.

Relevant Pages

  • Re: Forth and Unix -- history
    ... Forth, as a language, gives you all the building blocks. ... So does FORTRAN, so does C, so does PERL, so does Python. ... to interface to some free library written in whatever language. ...
    (comp.lang.forth)
  • Recommend an E-book Meeting the Following Criteria (Newbie, Long)
    ... I know several programming languages namely Java, Perl and C in this order ... Now I'm wondering which Python book I should get as there are so many out ... I'd like to mostly concentrate on language features but some pointers ...
    (comp.lang.python)
  • Re: Python or PHP?
    ... If it's one of the things for which Python ... every language here and there more ways to do something. ... you make Perl more complicated than it is:-D. ... Not the programmer. ...
    (comp.lang.python)
  • Re: Ruby vs. PHP
    ... done is checked out which versions of Perl, Python, YARV, Ruby, jRuby ... dynamic language to the seconds for the benchmark with gcc. ... YARV, Python, Perl and PHP have fairly close medians and the boxes are ...
    (comp.lang.ruby)
  • Re: Python vs. Perl
    ... I would say that the real difference between python and ... To help aid in this discussion, the following Python and Perl ... While Guido originally intended Python to be a second language ...
    (comp.lang.python)