Perl and Blackberries
Archive - Originally posted on "The Horse's Mouth" - 2008-10-23 23:47:17 - Graham Ellis
"Of course people will use Perl - it's free". No - whilst Perl is freely distributed [under license], that's not the sole reason that people use it. Blackberries, growing in profusion on the roadside at this time of year are free, but that doesn't mean that every motorist going past is going to stop and pick them.People use Perl because it's a darned good language! I used to say that I could write - in a day - code in Perl that would take me a week in C. Actually, I've changed what I say over the years as I've got to know Perl better ... I'm now saying that I could write in a morning the code that would take me a week in C. Yes - truly claiming a 10:1 improvement in productivity. And the same can be said for certain other languages such as PHP, Python and Ruby. I'll stick with "a day" for Tcl and Lua - where there's longer code to write and / or not such a thorough set of standard functions in what are designed to be much smaller and tighter languages, and I'll say "a couple of days" for Java coding.
See Heaven's Gate for the blackberries in context, and here for Perl programming.