gavino said:
I am amazed as I read online how many people say perl a an archaic
tool.
If perl is used right is it
1 not spagetti?
2 debugible?
3 fast?
4 easy to come back to after 6months and know whats going on?
Points 1, 2, and 4 depend mainly on the programmer not the language
(although some older languages made point 1 difficult to avoid).
As for point 3... how long is a piece of string? Or when does Moore's
Law finally come to an end? If Quantum Computing ever makes its way
past the pages of Scientific American, no doubt for some applications
it will make Perl look like a snail being compared to a photon. But
for other applications it will give no speed advantage in processing.
Interestingly, for tax purposes, it might quickly provide the best
ways of avoiding, a quite legal activity in contrast to evading,
tax very easily and quickly. But the same does not apply for running
through a payroll.
Although writing programmes for such a beast will take at least a
magnitude longer... it will make the lost art of assembly programming
a doddle.
In the end point 3 comes down to: where do you measure speed?
Experienced Perlers can know switch off and do something more useful
such as having a beer: Let us imagine someone attempting to write
in C a procedure to handle linked lists of strings. The end result
should run faster than something coded in Perl... but the programming
times between the two languages will be very different... plus the
debugging and testing... in C a careful watch needs to be kept on all
the pointers floating around waiting to be given the chance to
create a core dump or worse... the idea of using references in Perl
for such a thing does not arise (unless some complicated data
structures are involved).
But then, as they say, horses for courses.
Axel