On 06/28/2014 06:14 AM, slitt wrote:
LOL, at a client's place, I was trying to customize the Perl-written Interchange web store software (don't ever use it, it's an atrocity) on circa 2003 Red Hat, and had to use CPAN for a new capability. That CPAN download broke the client's Vim and some other softwares. It took me 2 hours to undo the damage.
Only 2 hours? You're good.
That was the beginning of the end of my relationship with Perl.
CPAN dependency hell is definitely no fun, especially when your distribution uses Perl internally. Some Perl applications/ frameworks come with their own module tree (and tools to maintain it). Another solution is bundling, such as the Cava packager [1].
I found Perl in 1998 and have yet to find anything I like better for my interests (system scripting, data munging, number crunching). After reading HOP [2] and SICP2 [3], I realized that most common/ popular languages easily give you imperative and OO styles, but Perl also makes list and functional styles easy (and probably more). I've found the latter approaches to be more agreeable to my way of thinking (engines working on sequences of data, rather than geneologically-related data mutating itself), and my programs have become more flexible, concise, and powerful as I write/ rewrite more Perl code using HOP/SICP ideas. The key differentiator is the Lambda function ("closures") -- it gives me separation of data and algorithms without the constraints of OO/ interface hierarchies or special template syntax (although I am still tempted to use the C preprocessor for Log::Log4perl, benchmarking/ profiling, etc.).
What do people like instead of Perl, and why? David [1] http://www.cavapackager.com/ [2] http://hop.perl.plover.com/ [3] http://mitpress.mit.edu/sicp/full-text/book/book.html