Content-type: text/html Downes.ca ~ Stephen's Web ~ Why I Use Perl...and Will Continue to Do So

Stephen Downes

Knowledge, Learning, Community

I have played around over the years with Python, Ruby and PHP, and even done work in java and C#. Back in the day I worked with Fortran and Basic. I used to be a C programmer and have never lost my love for the language. But today my language of choice is and continues to be Perl. Why? Well, this article lays out the list of reasons quite nicely. Where would I be without regular expressions and hashes? And compared to the other web languages, Perl is fast. Is it an enterprise production langauge? Probably not (but neither is Java). But it's the perfect tool for someone like me. So where did Perl go wrong? To my mind, this: you need to have root or administrator privileges to install Perl modules. So the much vaunted extensibility of Perl is available only to people who own their own servers. That ruled out - and continues to rule out - the vast majority of people. It's the single greatest problem I face when I want to distribute my software.

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Stephen Downes Stephen Downes, Casselman, Canada
stephen@downes.ca

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Last Updated: Dec 25, 2024 7:55 p.m.

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