Andy Lester will be making the trip up from Chicago this month for our Grand Rapids Perl Mongers meeting. He will be presenting, “Things you may not know about Perl”, so join us if you can.
Note the time is different than usual: it is going to be Friday evening from 5:30 - 6:30. I guarantee you won’t want to miss it!
If you’ve ever been curious about what lies beneath the biggest sites on the web you owe it to yourself to check out the Real Life Architectures section. I was surprised how many of them listed PHP in their technology stack.
In parts one and two I took a look at the differences and similarities between Ruby and Perl, and I think I owe it to everyone to publish a brief conclusion. My basic feeling is that while Ruby is a fantastic language, the following are a few reasons I won’t be abandoning Perl any time soon.
Perl has been in serious use since before Ruby was even a murmur on the internet. It has a long history of serving its purpose well and quite a list of accomplishments: everything from powerful, dynamic websites to utilities supporting the daily operations of large companies. Its performance and reliability have been proven over and over again.
The Perl community is active, friendly, and full of very intelligent people. As evidence of that I submit the CPAN, the Perl Mongers groups that can be found around the globe, and the different Perl mailing lists that gladly offer help to anyone seeking it.
Anyone who has used mod_perl can attest to the flexibility and power it gives developers. I have been involved in using it as a platform to seamlessly integrate custom Perl authentication and navigation with third-party, closed-source web applications written in completely different languages. Mod_perl is a serious tool that I would have a very difficult time leaving behind.
In part one I started talking about a few differences between Ruby and Perl. Let’s continue with a few other topics I think are key to understanding both of these languages.
Most everyone these days does it, though some will argue what “it” really is. There are clear benefits, regardless of the specifics of your definition, and the vast majority of modern languages support writing Object Oriented code in one form or another. Ruby, as with a few other languages (notably, Python), takes OO to the extreme — everything is an object. Even the most simple code contains objects. Care to guess how many objects this line contains?
['a', '2', 'Z'].join(',')I found this charting tool on Technorati today and thought it was an interesting way to quantify the buzz surrounding different keywords. For fun I’ve included a few charts here, comparing Perl and Ruby. It will be interesting to see how these change over time.
| Perl Programming | Ruby Programming |
|---|---|
Get your own chart! |
Get your own chart! |
At the time of this post, there is a slight difference in scale between the Perl and Ruby charts — Ruby averages just a bit more than what Perl manages. Keep in mind this is only counting blog postings, so things like IRC and mailing list traffic are left out. There are other factors, too, such as the possibility that Ruby programmers are simply more vocal or more likely to have a blog.
Also note the marked increase in Perl posts around August 11th as Kirrily Robert pointed out in the comments. Also thanks to Kirrily for recommending a change to the keywords to include “programming”.
And as a final note, I’m not sure how reliable this information is. The chart seems to occasionally be missing some information, such as a section of time with no data. So ignore that if it comes up.
The take-away of all of this, I suppose, is that we should be are being more vocal. Perl is an excellent and powerful programming language with a huge base of users. And did I mention we get CPAN and Catalyst? So get to Good work, Perl users — spread the word!