[CentOS] OT: programming language for morons (newbie friendly language in Open Source world)

Les Mikesell lesmikesell at gmail.com
Tue Dec 14 21:10:24 UTC 2010


On 12/14/2010 2:55 PM, Kwan Lowe wrote:
> On Tue, Dec 14, 2010 at 2:41 PM, Les Mikesell<lesmikesell at gmail.com>  wrote:
>>
>>> Personally I've banned Perl from the network primarily because of the
>>> maintenance disaster that is CPAN.
>>
>> And your perfectly maintained public source of equivalent functionality
>> is in what language?
>>
>> But, you should rarely if ever use CPAN code directly in Centos for the
>> same reasons you wouldn't drop a stock upstream kernel every few days.
>> Most of what you are likely to need are packaged - and maintained - in
>> EPEL or rpmforge.
>
> :)
> Thank goodness for CPAN2RPM.  I use it quite often for the occasional
> package that is not in the default repos.

That keeps sanity in your RPM database, but doesn't help much with the 
situation where functionality in the modules is refactored and you need 
to update (or not) certain versions of different modules together. If 
you are pulling from someone else's repo, they will hopefully have 
tested the versions they've packaged already.

> As to Perl.. though it still is my preferred language for getting
> things done (mainly because I understand it that I first think out
> problems in Perl then convert to other languages), I have seen some
> bad, really bad Perl code..

Yes, perl doesn't stop you from doing bad things.  If it did, it would 
likely stop you from doing good things that no one considered before. 
But, how likely do you think it is that someone who writes bad perl code 
would do better (or maybe even anything...) in a language with more 
annoying syntax rules?

-- 
   Les Mikesell
    lesmikesell at gmail.com





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