Why Perl Programmers Should Worry

September 25th, 2004 • Perl

It’s pretty obvious that lately we’ve been hearing much less about Perl than we hear about “other” languages, PHP5 has been released, Java5 is almost there, Python is advancing quickly, and Perl6, well, it’s still under development.

Perl is my favorite language, I know it looks like line noise, I know it’s possible to write cryptic code that nobody can decipher, I know that $_ isn’t very liked, but I still love it. I don’t know many languages where you can create your own syntax in runtime, or add exception support when the language doesn’t have them, or filter the source code on the fly without self-modification or nasty tricks. I get emotional when it comes to Perl.

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Bashing Perl to Sell!

July 9th, 2004 • 1 comment Perl, Rants

Are you tired of waiting for page rebuilding, or twiddling your thumbs waiting for slow technologies like Perl and CGI? ExpressionEngine cures all that and more by providing a 100% dynamic experience that is virtually as fast and light-weight as static pages, yet infinitely more flexible and dynamic.

OK, I hear a lot of bold Perl bashing statements, but frankly, this one is the worst ever! I know that a lot of PHP programmers don’t like Perl very much, but come on, Perl isn’t even a technology to be compared with CGI, Perl’s performance comes closer to C, and almost always out-performs PHP’s, and I’m only talking about Perl5, don’t get me started on Parrot and Perl6, heck, Parrot runs PHP better than PHP itself!

I’m not trying to start a Perl vs. PHP debate, I love both, I use each wherever applicable, I understand each one’s advantages and limitations, but I hate it when marketing hype starts using myths to sell, when some company says “Our software runs better than their software because ours is rewritten in C++, theirs is Java.”, and it’s not even close to truth!.

Let’s get one thing straight here. PHP is a very domain-specific language, sure it can be used as a general-purpose one, but it rarely is. PHP’s performance is amazing when running as a Web server module, especially when combined with caching and opcode optimization, even better, PHP5′s ZendEngine2 gives a large boost to performance; but even that doesn’t make it faster than Perl, Yahoo! said so some time ago, they know Perl’s faster, but they also know it has a tough learning curve that might slow down development.

As for ExpressionEngine, it might be a fast piece of software, but please, when you want to market it, don’t just assert without backing your arguments. I might be tired of waiting for page rebuilding, but that has nothing to do with Perl being a “slow technology”, you can take my word for it. Anybody can write good PHP code that runs two times faster than bad Perl code, and vice versa. It’s really not the language that matters, it’s how you use it.

Codeflakes

March 31st, 2004 • General, Perl, PHP

Today, Codeflakes project just started. It’s an application development framework designed to simplify developers’ job with least overhead and hassle.

I’m a big fan of thee “P” languages (Perl, PHP and Python). I’m a fan of Perl’s flexibility and its do-what-i-mean principle. I’m a fan of PHP’s ease of deployment and integration with Apache. I’m a fan of Python’s clean syntax and immediate integration with C applications.

Now being a fan of these three languages, and trying to dig my way through tons of code writting for these languages, I’ve decided to roll my own development framework, defying programmers’ holy moto “Do NOT reinvent the wheel!”.

Codeflakes isn’t just wheel reinvention, it isn’t yet another framework that tells developers to do this, do that, bug here, fix that, etc. It’s, or at least will be, designed to be simple, unified, easy to use, and most of all, runs on three “P” languages. Hopefully, this project wouldn’t die as many other open-source projects do. I’ll personally keep developing it, and if I’m lucky enough, others would join in too.

There are a lot of decisions to make, lots of discussions to take place, and a roadmap to define. I’ll be doing those shortly.

For more information about this project, please visit it’s website http://www.codeflakes.com.