Perl and Blackberries

"Of course people will use Perl - it's free". No - whilst Perl is freely distributed [under license], that's not the sole reason that people use it. Blackberries, growing in profusion on the roadside at this time of year are free, but that doesn't mean that every motorist going past is going to stop and pick them.

People use Perl because it's a darned good language! I used to say that I could write - in a day - code in Perl that would take me a week in C. Actually, I've changed what I say over the years as I've got to know Perl better ... I'm now saying that I could write in a morning the code that would take me a week in C. Yes - truly claiming a 10:1 improvement in productivity. And the same can be said for certain other languages such as PHP, Python and Ruby. I'll stick with "a day" for Tcl and Lua - where there's longer code to write and / or not such a thorough set of standard functions in what are designed to be much smaller and tighter languages, and I'll say "a couple of days" for Java coding.

See Heaven's Gate for the blackberries in context, and here for Perl programming.
(written 2008-10-23, updated 2008-11-02)

Associated topics are indexed under

G906 - Well House Consultants - Programming Standards
  [2364] Getting it right from the start - new programmers - (2009-08-17)
  [2363] Alpaca Case or Camel Case - (2009-08-16)
  [2322] Looking for a practical standards course - (2009-08-05)
  [1679] PHP - Sanitised application principles for security and useability - (2008-06-16)
  [1596] Selling curry to the chinese takeaway - (2008-03-31)
  [945] Code quality counts - (2006-11-26)
  [356] Sudoku helper or sudoku cheat - (2005-06-23)
  [343] Should I use structured or object oriented? - (2005-06-10)
  [272] More to programming than just programming - (2005-04-08)
  [148] Programming in isolation - (2004-12-11)

P201 - Perl - Introduction
  [2832] Are you learning Perl? Some more examples for you! - (2010-06-27)
  [2812] What is Perl? - (2010-06-15)
  [2070] Converting to Perl - the sort of programs you will write - (2009-03-08)
  [1753] Perl v PHP, choosing the right language - (2008-08-14)
  [1717] Q - Should I use Perl or Python? - (2008-07-23)
  [924] The LAMP Cookbook - Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP / Perl - (2006-11-13)
  [846] Is Perl being replaced by PHP and Python? - (2006-08-27)
  [743] How to debug a Perl program - (2006-06-04)
  [691] Testing you Perl / PHP / MySQL / Tcl knowledge - (2006-04-19)
  [629] Choosing the right language - (2006-03-01)
  [604] Perl - multiprocess applications - (2006-02-13)
  [594] Twice is a co-incidence and three times is a pattern - (2006-02-07)
  [577] Learning to program in Perl or PHP - (2006-01-26)
  [382] Central London Courses - Perl, PHP, Python, Tcl, MySQL - (2005-07-18)
  [317] Programming languages - a comparison - (2005-05-20)
  [25] Release numbers - (2004-08-23)

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Some other Articles

A few of my favourite things
Volunteer v Employee - a skewed balance? (FSB)
Three Seasonal Pictures
Well structured coding in Perl
Perl and Blackberries
Pictures from a delegate
Daisy the Cow and a Pint of Ginger Beer
String matching in Perl with Regular Expressions
30th November - Santa Trip from Melksham
Lua - IAQ (Infrequently Answered Questions)

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