Re: Perl Doesn't Suck

Adam Turoff [[email protected]] quoth:
*>
*>Allow me to clarify: a degenerate case for installing a *single* *specific*
*>version of Perl never requires transfers or temporary disk space measured
*>in quarter gigabytes.

For a single user on a single machine, no, but considering disk space is
cheap these days it's probably not an issue.

*>Mirroring all of CPAN is not a pre-requisite for installing a version
*>of Perl, multiple versions of Perl, etc.

No, but since Perl is pretty plain, much plainer than Java, without the
added functionality of CPAN it's not unreasonable to add it in.

*>Chris and I are talking about the case where a user finds a piece
*>of software requiring (Perl|Java) and need to install the language
*>distribution as well as the software requiring that distribution
*>(or, a simpler case of installing a specific version of a language
*>distribution).  Wading through CPAN is not an issue here.

As an SA, I get a lot of requests from users who have linux on their
laptops and who sometimes find scripts they would like to run only to come
to me in complete exasperation of not getting what they need installed,
what version of Perl they need, how to use CPAN.pm, and what magic
incantation they need to say before all will be revealed about which XML
or Tk or DBI they need to use and where to find it. I've never fielded
these sorts of questions for Java though much of them develop in Java so
the familiarity may make a difference.

Perl has so many versions with so many bits of code out on the net and on
CPAN that only work with certain subsets of them that for the average user
I don't think it's all that easy to get a grip on.

*>Surely.  And if you want to believe that Perl sucks, please do.  

I don't believe I was saying that. My point was that you had a bad
experience installing Java on FreeBSD and have declared that it sucks to
install it. Unsurprisingly, I have never had a problem installing or
supporting Java on Solaris but there are plenty of things to grumble about
Perl sometimes, especially if you deploy multiple versions and
configurations across multiple platforms and multiple versions of those
platforms.

*>say so.  I chronicled my experiences in detail to show how bad it can
*>be, and to highlight how remarkably well-engineered and supported Perl
*>is by comparison.

Perl6 could make major bonus points for the SA and for others by improving
the installation and configuration details to make it more portable and
more 'packagable' for enterprise deployment. And an SDK.

e.