[Novalug] Perl - PHP or religious wars?

Clif Flynt clif@cflynt.com
Sat Mar 5 21:58:53 EST 2011


James Blinn, the NASA guy who did the Voyager Jupiter and Saturn flyby
CGI stuff in the  mid-1980's used FORTRAN for graphics processing.

At the time, C being the favored language, FORTRAN was considered
a nearly-worst choice for graphics processing.

I saw him in an interview where he was asked about this.  His reply
was that C would probably be a better language, but he knew FORTRAN,
and he knew it well.

The moral of the story is to use the tool you're most comfortable
with.  With the caveat that some languages are really bad choices
for certain jobs - doing finite element analysis in SNOBOL might
be something you could benchmark with a calendar.

Compared to well-designed languages like LISP, Modula-2 or even Java,
I'm not sure whether PHP or Perl is the worse designed language.

Compared to languages that were designed to get a job done and not be
pretty about it - PHP and Perl hold up OK.

With a dozen or so languages under my belt, I like Tcl & C to get stuff
done.  If I were going to learn a new language just to learn one, I'd
pick Lua or Ruby.  My current projects are forcing me to learn
javascript.

The more I learn about javascript, the more I like my cat.

Clif

-- 
... Clif Flynt ... http://www.cwflynt.com ... clif@cflynt.com ...
.. Tcl/Tk: A Developer's Guide (2nd edition) - Morgan Kauffman ..
.... 18'th Annual Tcl/Tk Conference:  2011, Manassas, VA USA ....
.............  http://www.tcl.tk/community/tcl2011/  ............









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