Ratings and Reviews : Listing
A major city, several thousands users, a broken database, all backups corrupted, node is dead...
3 hours of perl... data recovered from broken backups, 2 more hours loading it, the data is reloaded, the node is live again.
It is neither elegant nor nice nor stylish but when looking for solutions it is probably the shortest path.
After years of coding in Perl I've never got to like the code I write, in fact, I often wonder: was it me that wrote this!
After years of coding in Perl I've never stopped learning something new about Perl.
After years of coding in Perl I understood that even being probably the ugliest language in the world as far as code goes it is still the one that turned the most useful of them all.
After years of coding in Perl I never regretted the day I decided to learn it. As a troubleshooter, Perl is probably the most useful tool I've had in my whole life...
It isn't really beautiful... It's simply useful!
Ok. So Perl may have some deficiencies, but what language doesn't?
You can write very clean, readable code or you can write very dirty, undecipherable code. It just depends on how much time you have and your personal development abilities. This goes for almost any programming language.
I've worked with Python (blah!) and a little bit with Ruby, but Perl is still my favorite!
I was a biology graduate student in 1992 working on the Human Genome project and needing to make different databases talk to each other and needing to munge data files from many formats into new formats - what a nightmare.
Along came Perl, the rest is history.
I left biology, began working in computer science, became an open source developer, and have never looked back.
After 10 years using Perl in systems administration, data visualization, and bioinformatics Perl continues to just Get The Job Done(TM).
However...
In recent years I've been teaching high school students how to program, and after my initial experiences with teaching Perl 5 as their first language, I will not continue. I will either wait for Perl 6, or switch to Ruby or even Python. As a first language, students need predictability and simplicity. Perl 5 offers neither of those.
I still owe many thanks to Larry Wall for writing Perl, Tom Christiansen, and Randall Schwartz for writing the Camel and the Llama, and Tim O'Reilly for creating the O'Reilly books and for writing Unix Power Tools, which is how I first read about Perl.
Perl might look quite old fashioned compared to new script language like python. For example, it lacks a true model object (object is done through references, the same way you do oo using C and pointers on functions).
It has however many advantages : it is almost present on all unices, including the oldest or most proprietary, it is quite efficient and really quick to write for an experienced user.
Disavantages includes a laxism in parameter checks (you can type whatever comes to your mind, it'll most probably compile and execute), a really hard learning curve when you lend toward advanced functionalities and a tradition of offuscation which can make code almost unreadable when implicit symbols are used abusively.
Perl can do whatever you want and the way you like it : it's both suitable for a dirty hack, a quick log parsing or a fully modular business oriented application.
As cgi application, perl has been replaced by php which makes things much easier to secure. The lack of boundaries checking, implicit and dynamic allocation are best suitable for quick written programs running in a secure environment.