True, I suppose people could be using the .php extension for anything, but I
can't see why one would do that. (also, .html's are in many cases perl I
know, because I've done that myself.
And also (more what I was getting at) if you have a url like
http://example.com/foo/bar/baz ... well, you don't reall yknow whethe
rfoo, bar or baz are actual directories under $DOCROOT or RewriteRules
or Aliases or ScriptAliases or...
Have you ever regretted using perl? Ever get any flack from others about
using it, and are there maintenance issues that say, wouldn't be there with
other languages?
Yes on all points, but with a good explanation:
1) There are some things that are best expressed in C, some are best
expressd in perl, or bash, and so on and on. A lot of things of course
can be done in most languages, one way or another. I regret that a very
small number of things that we use were done in perl rather than
something _more appropriate to the problem_ - but sometimes it's not my
choice
That said, there is one enormous project written in C++ that I regret[1]
was not written in perl, so it works both ways
2) Plenty of people prefer python, C, java, whatever. At our place, cos
we use so much perl, there is less flak - but still there is some.
Sometime it's justified, e.g. an old version of perl that we use.
Sometime's it not, and results from people's misunderstandings.
That said, we also use oracle and mysql, and both of those get
criticized for all sorts of reasons, so it's not limited to perl.
3) I've had reasonably trivial but annoying issues maintaining a suite
of OO classes recently. In java I would know what my member variables
were called and they could be 'private' or 'protected'. Not the same
thing in perl, which meant I had do do a little bit more grepping and
testing.
Now, that was annoying, but like I say pretty minor in the grand scheme
of things. I'm sure that there would be maintenance headaches in _any_
language - just different ones
Have you considered going with PHP/JSP/etc.. on the web side, but having
those languages talk to a perl daemon? (I didn't ask would you consider, I
wonder if you had already or perhaps the manager types tried to push it.)
We use PHP for some things on a few of our internal development
machines, because some developers have PHP skills and it's an
appropriate solution to particular problems. On the live site there is
currently no PHP and won't be for a good long time. I don't know the
exact reasons.
I have a feeling that we do use some JSP somewhere, but that would be on
an application we bought in from somewhere else, and is running on its
own boxes.
I've used perl on large projects before, I liked parts of it. seemed to work
pretty good overall, except for the web interface stuff. (was an N-tier
design)
We've got a good number of large projects and I think that careful
planning and design makes such things work, in any language. Perl can be
used for enormous projects but you need the appropriate planning,
architecture and design first - just as for any language.
P
[1] yeah, no worries, we'll just upgrade glibc on these critical servers
and recompile the world shall we?
