Les Mikesell wrote:
On 12/14/2010 4:43 AM, Natxo Asenjo wrote:
Python enforces you to be more consistent, which is not a bad thing if you want to understand better what you are doing in the very beginning. Later on Perl, Ruby, C#, Java, C/C++ might be a good alternatives, as they probably are much stronger in a lot of fields for more complex tasks.
use strict; use warnings;
if you write Perl and do not use that, you will have problems, yes.
But remember each tool has its own use case. You don't need a hammer when you have screws. It's the same with programming languages. And Python and Perl are often used as the "Swiss Army Knife". Useful for a lot of ad-hoc and not too heavy routine tasks, but you won't rely on it when going hunting in the wilderness.
There was an article in Dr. Dobbs' about 10 years ago, where perl was referred to as the Swiss Army chainsaw. <g> <snip>
Perl is easy to write, starts up relatively quickly, and has a lot of available modules for specific operations. Since it interpreted as
Yup. <snip>
yet-another-syntax for config files. But, it is somewhat hard to scale and maintain because people write in different styles and things that start small tend to have a lot of global variables that are hard to remember as the code grows. And perl is not great for GUI programs.
*snarl* There is *no* excuse for lots of globals. Pass your stuff. The most complicated programs I've ever written in perl (I guess that was the billing system for a very small telecom, 600-700 lines or more) had less than 10 globals, and maybe less than five (it's been 6 years since I was there, so I don't remember). Using globals is *lousy*, *lazy* programming, and I wouldn't trust folks that write anything more than a 20 or 30 line script to program *anything* until they'd gone back and internalized modular coding. And then I'd review their code for the next six months.... <snip> mark