🚀 go-pugleaf

oz@nexus.yorku.ca (ozan s. yigit) writes:

>Felix Sebastian Gallo [amongst other things]

>		... Heck, even Java might be useful to someone. ... 

>it already is, to more people than you are willing to admit. 
>also expect a ground-level java for more perl-like tasks later this year.

From whom? This would be great news if true.

Perl is fantastic at the level of whipping together a quick
ten-line utility. It's so useful, I can't imagine how I ever
got anything done before Perl. I'll never give it up.

Since a 'method' is usually just a little utility within a
larger OO architecture, I often find myself wishing I could
implement a Java method in Perl.

I could do the whole program in Perl, but I find Perl to be
just too flexible to serve as the skeleton of a large program.
I use Perl to perform utility operations, but the larger
the project, the less comfortable I am with Perl.

If I were a master of either Java or Perl, I could do 
any job entirely in the one language and never experience
any difficulty. Intermediate users, though, notice
that a particular tool makes some things easier than
it makes others. The
whole idea of a really well-designed tool is
to enable an intermediate user to perform like a master
in those tasks for which that tool has been optimized
without requiring that the user actually *be* a master.

I think Java is much better for a bigger program which
really ought to be designed carefully and will need to
be maintained. Perl is better for one-shot tasks (doing
in 5 minutes what used to take an afternoon with C),
utilities (mostly for my own use), and tools that can
be quickly modified (usu. by changing a reg expr) to
do something slick with a file of data.

For this reason, I'd like to do my utility tasks in Perl,
my large projects (mostly) in Java, and within Java,
I wish I could use Perl or some Perl-like features
to implement *some* of my methods, esp. parsers and
formatters. Java is just extremely weak at string
handling (parsing data streams) compared with Perl.

__Glen Perkins__
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