XML::Simple for Perl Developers

An anonymous reader writes "XML has become pervasive in the computing world and is buried more and more deeply into modern applications and operating systems. It's imperative for the Perl programmer to develop a good understanding of how to use it. In a surprisingly large number of cases, you only need one tool to integrate XML into a Perl application, XML::Simple. This article tells you where to get it, how to use it, and where to go next."

Sweet!

[bennomatic]

Or in other words, XML-ent!

Re:

[Intron]

Yes. But someone has finally figured out how to use it.

XML::LibXML is where it's at

[teknomage1]

XML::LibXML is where it's at, it is a) quite a bit faster and b) has a sensible interfce rather than giving you useless empty hashrefs in the middle of a tree.

Re:XML::LibXML is where it's at

[rvalles]

I agree completely. I've used both recently (and XML::Xpath) and XML::LibXML is much more powerful and sane, while at the same time it is about as easy to learn. There's the added advantages that being just LibXML bindings what's learned is useful in other programming languages, and that nodes are referred using Xpath, which is a really powerful and useful W3C standard that, again, is worth learning.

What?

[cliveholloway]

This is the most pointless article I've seen linked from slashdot in a long time (and yes, I've seen a lot of crap here). What is the point of posting a run of the mill tutorial on something that's been covered many times before? [google.com]

Having spent a lot of time playing with this crap lately, can I just butt into this pointless thread and say screw XML, use YAML [yaml.org] or JSON [json.org] instead. XML is a steaming, clumsy overrated turd. I benchmarked XML::Simple [cpan.org] against YAML::Syck [cpan.org] - the latter encoded 2.5 times faster and parsed nine times faster than XML::Simple. The syck library is indeed aptly named.

"Leverage the power of XML" by deprecating it wherever you can for a more sensible cross platform format.

</rant>

Re:

[archen]

I'm a YAML convert myself. I used to use XML::Simple quite often for configuration files but generally wasn't to happy with the readability of what it generated. YAML by contrast was pretty easy to read and write your configs by hand if you wanted (a pain with XML). However XML isn't going anywhere soon. In some industries XML is just now starting to grab attention for interoperability and I've had to deal with XML stuff that was just handed to me more and more. In that sense XML::Simple has made my li

Re:

[colinbrash]

Ignoring the YAML/XML thing, this is still pointless. How many people using Perl don't know how to use CPAN? How many people using Perl can't understand CPAN docs? How many people reading the XML::Simple docs need further help? It's called XML::Simple for a reason! It really IS simple.

Re:

[colinbrash]

What are "CPAN docs"? If you can figure out how to install one module you can figure out how to install them all. Also since you know how to read the docs for XML::Simple you know how to read them for the other one as well.

Perhaps XML::Simple is easier to use, but your line of reasoning is like saying it is harder to buy a Ford than a Chevy so buy the Chevy. Built on extremely flawed reasoning.

I'm not saying buy anything or use anything or whatever. I'm just saying the article is pointless.

CPAN do

Re:

[Cthefuture]

Are there XML-RPC equivalents for YAML and/or JSON? Although I'm sure it would be easy to create something I am just wondering if there is any sort of standard.

How do you process YAML or JSON in Javascript (eg. in a browser)? Most browsers have built-in support for processing XML.

Re:

[maxume]

eval('(' + json + ')'). There are libraries if you don't trust your source:

http://www.json.org/js.html [json.org]

is one.

Re:

[moonbender]

Executing your configuration files? Worst idea ever. (Yes, I'm aware you offer an alternative. It's still... twisted.)

Re:

[hoggoth]

> How do you process YAML or JSON in Javascript (eg. in a browser)? Most browsers have built-in support for processing XML

Wow, that must be great having support for XML built into Javascript.
Oh, by the way, JSON is expressed in valid Javascript syntax. That means JSON is already Javascript. No libraries or support necessary.

Sorry for the snarkiness. 'Been struggling with some XML code. That always puts me in a bad mood.

Re:What?

[jtolds]

"Leverage the power of XML" by deprecating it wherever you can for a more sensible cross platform format.
</rant>

1. Advocate XML deprecation.
2. Use XML style conversation markers.
3. ???
4. Profit!!!

Re:

[cliveholloway]

I TELL YOU IT'S A FRICKIN' PLAGUE!!!

lameness filter encountered - need this line to post...

Re:

[Kangburra]

XML is a steaming, clumsy overrated turd

You don't like it much then!? ;-)

Re:

[cliveholloway]

Can you tell I was in a bad mood? :)

No, I understand that it *can* be well used, just that for 90% of the applications it *is* used for appear to only be using it because the author once read somewhere that leveraging XML was the way forward. If you're dealing with data storage only, XML is always the wrong answer(*).

cLive ;-)

(*) unless the question is, "What is the worst format to store configuration data in?" :)

Re:

[Anonymous Coward]

(*) unless the question is, "What is the worst format to store configuration data in?" :)

I can think of worse. How about a flat namespace populated with pairs of the form (name, number). After that list, you can have a giant (about 2^19940 bytes long) of 8 byte values, related to the pairs as follows: the key with name 'pair' has the value stored in the M(number)th bin, where M is the Mersenne Twister function. [wikipedia.org]

Re:

[sporb]

See -> Perl::Troll

is this a strawman attack?

[GunFodder]

I agree that the article is pointless. XML::Simple is the oldest Perl XML library in existence, and there are better alternatives available. How does YAML::Syck hold up against XML::LibXML for performance? Is the syntax as easy to use as XML::XPath? Who else uses YAML? I don't want to invest my time in a data format that no one else uses.

Re:

[cliveholloway]

I don't know but I'm sure you can Benchmark them :) Even if no one uses it, your own apps will be faster. All depends what area you work in, I guess.

Thanks

[goombah99]

Hey thank you for pointing this out. I did not know about this. JSON and YAML are pretty nice.

Re:

[moonbender]

Why are you using an XML parser within an inner loop? Or if you aren't, why are you benchmarking it? I still don't like XML, though, it's just not pretty.

Re:

[bcrowell]

Thanks for the pointers to YAML and JSON, both of which I thought were interesting. However, I think you're comparing apples and oranges in a couple of different ways. Benchmarking XML::Simple against YAML::Syck doesn't really make sense, because nobody is claiming that XML::Simple should be used on large files, or for performance-intensive applications; its claim to fame, compared to other XML parsers, is just its ease of use. JSON seems like a sensible format to use if what you're basically doing is seria

what a coincidence (re: XML::Tiny)

[toby]

I just today noticed the announcement of XML::Tiny [cpan.org].

hmm

[XanC]

It only claims to support a subset of XML, and of course it is called "Tiny", so I guess I can understand not supporting CDATA or attributes (...maybe). But for a ">" in a CDATA block to cause it to fail? It doesn't seem very useful.

Re:

[orkysoft]

It's still useful if you're only using it to read a limited kind of files, such as configuration files that were generated by the program itself. Of course, when the program needs to parse XML files generated by other programs, a more comprehensive module is needed.

Re:

[Saint Stephen]

Flame me if you want, but that guy's comments at the end of his README, and the link to his Wishlist page, are just too much. Chime in if you read it. /rolls eyes

A good tool for small tasks, but...

[Scareduck]

... utterly useless for anything of real size. XML::Simple is a huge memory sink, because, as mentioned elsewhere, it insists on generating full hash and array representations of the source XML text. This seems to be the side effect of taking too seriously a lot of Perl advice enthusiastically handed out in the older documentation. (Put file text into a huge array! Don't close your file descriptors!) The rest of us know better.

I came in here to say this

[Wee]

Was exactly what I was going to say. I've used XML::Simple a lot, but only for reading in small documents, like config files. It works well for that. But I'd never use it on something that was bigger than, say, 100K. It's too slow and resource intensive. It does, however live up to its name. It's a very simple interface to an XML doc.

One thing I user it for was representing a database in XML. Once I had the DB layout in a datastructure, it was one line to print it out. Of course, this was before I knew about DBIx::XML_RDB...

-B

Re:

[localman]

The rest of us know better.

Hey now, it depends on the context. Sometimes it is good to just put text into a huge data structure. Sometimes it's not. In the end, a smart programmer who understands the issues is better than a rule.

Cheers.

Simple is not good

[MarkKnopfler]

In my personal experience, Simple is probably the worst implementation of an XML parser in perl. For a simple implementation, I have found Twig to be much more useful, sensible and fast.

XML data structure serialization

[barnacle]

This is the same approach that is built-in to the qore language http://qore.sourceforge.net/ [sourceforge.net].

It makes it really easy to manipulate data in XML format.

However, qore supports deserialization of mixed text and data and multiple out-of order elements, XML attributes (imagine parsing a docbook file for example), as well as serialization (conversion of a qore data structure to an XML string) with the same features.

The same limitations regarding streaming input and very large files affect this approach, but in all

XSLT can't do arithmetic? WTF?

[johnny99]

The author of that article says you'll want to use the magic of perl and XML::Simple because "XSLT can't do arithmetic" and proceeds to do magical things like increase numbers by 20%.

That's just ... bizarre. Of course you can do that with XSLT! <xsl:value-of select="whatever * 1.2">

Then he formats a number -- because XSLT, of course, doesn't have a format-number() [w3schools.com] function.

Next article -- why you should commute to work in an airplane because, as everyone knows, cars can't turn corners.

No, XSLT doesn't count

[Dion]

XSLT is disqualified because it's impossible to do anything of any complexity in it without going insane.

Not only is the syntax horendously complex, but there are major misimplemented features that force strange and illogical workarounds, but people used to real programming languages have a really hard time grasping the template style leading to even more frustrations.

XSLT is a complete paradox, on one hand it's supposed to let non-programmers manipulate xml, but at the same time it's so hard to use that pr

Nice for simple data translation

[SCHecklerX]

I used XML::Simple in a script I wrote to grab data from my garmin GPS to use at http://www.gpsvisualizer.com/ [gpsvisualizer.com] Worked great without a lot of extra stuff to learn for a simple task.

Once again blocked by the install instructions ...

[jc42]

I'd looked into XML::Simple some time back, and gave up because I couldn't successfully install it. So again I went through IBM's install instructions, starting with that "perl -MCPAN" command, which of course told me at the start that I already had a ~/.cpan directory. Anyway, it seemed to be going ok until the "make install", which ended with:

Running make install
Warning: You do not have permissions to install into /usr/local/lib/perl5/site_perl/5.8.8/mach at /usr/local/lib/perl5/site_perl/5.8.8/ExtUtils

Re:Once again blocked by the install instructions

[Intron]

To install local CPAN modules, see:
http://sial.org/howto/perl/life-with-cpan/non-root / [sial.org]

Re:

[jc42]

Well, that didn't work too well. When it asked for args to "perl Makefile.PL", I gave it INSTALL_BASE=~, and then when it got around to running the command, it said:

'INSTALL_BASE' is not a known MakeMaker parameter name.

It then proceeded to attempt installing in the system libraries, and failed again because I wasn't root.

I wonder what's going on here?

Re:

[shobadobs]

Bah.

http://haskell.org/ [haskell.org]

Re:Who The Hell Still Uses Perl?

[BrianRoach]

"Outside of non-professional teenage Slashdot readers who still think the shitty Perl syntax is 'kewl', who the hell cares about the language anymore?"

I usually don't reply to trolls, but ...

The answer is hundreds of thousands of people around the world who use the correct tool for a given job, rather then trying to hammer in screws with the "latest and greatest".

PS, if you're not clueless and actually are a professional software developer, you can write code in perl that is every bit as readable as . It even supports comments!

- Roach
(Who writes code in perl, as well as a number of other languages depending on the task at hand.)

Re:

[Lars512]

The answer is hundreds of thousands of people around the world who use the correct tool for a given job, rather then trying to hammer in screws with the "latest and greatest".

I tend to use Python for most things, and consider it a general purpose language, suitable for all but performance critical tasks. I'd put Perl and Ruby in the same basket, as general languages with many libraries which just help you get things done. To me, these languages seem pretty interchangeable in this respect. In that case,

Re:Who The Hell Still Uses Perl?

[TheSkyIsPurple]

I don't know about GP, but I've got a couple hundred hosts that have PERL installed, but not Ruby or Python, and getting those others installed would require alot of work. (some technical, given the age and OS on some of them... but mostly configuration management style issues)

Since there is alot of PERL code already doing work in this environment, and PERL is on everything already... it makes sense to stick with what's there.

Re:

[daliman]

Hmmm... If you were feeling like playing devils advocate, you could suggest that the situation is the same with Windows... Of course I would never say such a thing!

Re:

[TheSkyIsPurple]

No kidding... there's a reason I'm doing a ton of VBScript work now... We've got several hundred of those as well, and guess what they all have? =-)

Re:

[spottedkangaroo]

> PERL

Just an fyi ... Perl isn't an acronym and that capitalization is used to recognize inexperienced Perl programmers. My guess is you don't like Perl becuase you never really got into it. Perl vs Python vs Ruby vs Pike is a pretty silly thing to argue. It's largely a matter of preference like vim vs emacs. So the whole argument is ridiculous...

But Perl isn't an acronym.

Re:

[TheSkyIsPurple]

>My guess is you don't like Perl becuase you never really got into it

You kidding? I love perl. I never said anything against it.

Don't read too much into a typo my friend =-)

Re:

[Lord Ender]

I'm curious: What hosts are you writing for which don't support modern high level languages (without excessive effort)?

Re:

[TheSkyIsPurple]

I didn't say it would be technically difficult. It would just take awhile to prove that the other software wouldn't affect our environment. It would require alot of formal testing, documentation, discussions, and meetings. Then after that we'd end up supporting scripts in more than one language since the old code won't disappear overnight.

Re:

[JourneyExpertApe]

PS, if you're not clueless and actually are a professional software developer, you can write code in perl that is every bit as readable as .

I don't know about you, but I don't find " ." very readable. If that's what modern Perl syntax looks like, then I don't wanna go there.

Re:

[Elias Israel]

A well-designed programming language enables great programmers to create masterworks, encourages good programmers to produce great code, and makes bad programmers go looking for another profession.

Perl causes great programmers to produce good-enough code, makes good programmers produce bad code, and enables bad programmers to consider themselves software experts.

That said, anything that permits programmers in any language to work in XML is probably a good thing. Might teach them a few things about st

Perl supports comments...

[patio11]

... as one of more than one ways to do things. Unfortunately, every Perl program I have seen (with the merciful exception of POPFile) picks one of the other ways. TMTOWTDI, don't you know.

The problem with Perl isn't the language. OK, let me amend that: s/ (t)/just $1/. Its that the culture which surrounds the language encourages practices which are at odds with maintainability. You can't seperate Perl code from Perl coders, and Perl coders are, to a disturbing degree, prone to creating unmaintainable cr

Re:Who The Hell Still Uses Perl?

[andres32a]

Slashdot.org!!

Hello, AC

[Scareduck]

There's a reason they're called "Cowards". Those of us who've been around a while know that there are all kinds of languages out there, and plenty of them can be used to write good code. The real problem with Perl is that Larry Wall is slowly losing his mind, adding features that nobody asked for; a good example is the new, backwards-incompatible regexps. (Don't go off that there'll be a compatibility mode; that's beside the point. The hubris needed to upend this core part of the language is pretty asto

Re:Hello, AC

[nuzak]

> The hubris needed to upend this core part of the language is pretty astonishing.

You mean like the first time he messed around with regexes? Now any regex implementation that doesn't have perl's features is considered a toy. And Perl is merely catching up to Snobol and Icon.

Perl will do fine despite ignorant fools who sneer at it. Perl6 is still headed to perpetually unreleased oblivion, but some features will hopefully break off and find their way back into perl5 and elsewhere. Regexes among them.

Hello Nuzak

[symbolset]

Nobody is supposed to remember SNOBOL. There was no SNOBOL.

Re:

[Scareduck]

You mean like the first time he messed around with regexes?

No. Those were at least backward compatable. The new changes are backwards incompatible.

Re:

[nuzak]

The syntax of the perl language, including the syntax around regex literals, is incompatible. The syntax of the regexes themselves when you use the 'p5' option is exactly the same. I defy you to show otherwise.

Re:

[Watson Ladd]

I think the regex syntax change is aimed at reducing the line-noise quality of regexes, as well as making them more expressive. The interpreter change is mostly aimed at pooling the skills of the Perl, Python, and Ruby communities. Even if it looks like a lot of effort now, it will pay off a lot later.

Re:Hello, AC

[VGPowerlord]

What I find annoying is that core language features are changing operators for no reason other than to change operators.

Example: -> is changing to . The reason given is

-> becomes ., like the rest of the world uses.

Which also forces . to change to ~ (also .= is now ~=)
Which also forces =~ to change to ~~

That's three major operators in the language changed with the justification that the rest of the world does one of them differently. Except, by definition, people who already knew perl.

Perl6

[fanatic]

I'm hoping I die and/or retire before perl5 is discontinued.

Re:

[larry bagina]

I was looking forward to perl 6 until I heard about that.

Re:

[chromatic]

What I find annoying is that core language features are changing operators for no reason other than to change operators.

The Apocalypses and Synopses (which somehow you managed to quote without reading the surrounding context) explain the reasons for the changes.

Re:

[VGPowerlord]

Several operators have been given new names to increase clarity and better Huffman-code the language, while others have changed precedence.

is not a strong enough justification to change operators in a non-backward compatible way. It takes everything you've learned and throws it out the window. What is the incentive to me, as a developer, to learn Perl 6 over another language, since I have to relearn everything from scratch?

Also, why continue to call it Perl if the entire language's syntax changed? It wo

Re:

[VGPowerlord]

You keep using that word ("everything"). I do not think it means what you think it means.

You're right, there are some things that stayed the same. For example, prescript and postscript... assigning values to a variable (but NOT to an element of an array or hash, that syntax has changed)

However, the list of what HAS changed appears to be much longer:
Array manipulation, renaming operators, OO, Regex, the list goes on...

Why not try writing some Perl 6 code? I did that a couple of years ago. Perl 6 feels very

Re:

[nuzak]

I assume you've never used Perl 6 rules. I have. They are so much more powerful and usable than Perl regexes that they deserved a different name.

Yeah, except as a sign of all the other pointless churn in Perl6, they're not called "rules" anymore. It's back to calling them regexes, even the new production-rule kind. No doubt it'll flip back to "rules" a couple more times this year.

I love perl, but perl6 is doomed thanks to bikeshed-painting like this.

Re:

[vandan]

Glad you asked. I do [homelinux.org]. And I like it. Got a problem with that?

Re:Who The Hell Still Uses Perl?

[fyngyrz]

Shitty... as opposed to what, PHP?

Well, certainly as opposed to Python, anyway. I went from perl to Python with a huge sigh of relief. I try to move a still-used perl script from perl to python once a week. Eventually I'll get them all, and I can leave the language behind. But I wrote tons of perl before I discovered Python and it is a long, long road to upgrade all that stuff. But every time I do one, I get a more maintainable, more english-like tool. Sometimes it takes me several minutes to even understand what the heck a perl script (even one of mine) is trying to do. Perl just... doesn't lead you to the most readable solutions. In fact, the better at it you get, the more obscure looking your programs get, it seems to me. That's an IMHO. :)

Anyway, if someone is looking for a scripting language today, Python is the cat's meow. Readable, sensible, extensible, flexible, well supplied with great libraries of functionality, powerful as hell, very easy to debug, not unreasonable in speed.

Python: syntactiacally significant whitespace.....

[fanatic]

gack!

Re:Python: syntactiacally significant whitespace..

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh yeah, it's just the absolute end of the world. Just a total show-stopper. After all, who would want readable, maintainable, consistent-looking code in a large team? What a disaster!

Re:

[Blackknight]

Not to mention you'd probably indent the code in any other language, python just gets rid of the extra braces.

Re:

[DrVomact]

Not to mention you'd probably indent the code in any other language, python just gets rid of the extra braces.

Yeah, but once you screw up the indents in a whole file of Python source, you're not going to think that this is such a great thing. See, if you accidentally flatten out the indents of Python code, you have no clue where blocks used to begin and end. If the same thing happened in Perl, you could easily straighten things out by using the curlies as cues. (Heck, my editor will fix indents automatic

Re:

[jc42]

Not to mention you'd probably indent the code in any other language, python just gets rid of the extra braces.

Yeah, but once you screw up the indents in a whole file of Python source, you're not going to think that this is such a great thing. See, if you accidentally flatten out the indents of Python code, you have no clue where blocks used to begin and end.

Yeah; I've seen quite a bit of this problem from my experiments with python. Usually, it comes about when trying to exchange code via email. Lots

Re:

[localman]

In fact, the better at it you get, the more obscure looking your programs get

Well, I can tell you that's not true. If you're willing to believe me, I'll claim that I've become very proficient at perl in the past 9 years and my code has become much easier to read. I think those who have worked with me would agree. Some have even said so specifically. You just have to have a little self dicipline and a sense of clarity and aesthetics.

Now, if you don't have such sense, or if you just like another language,

Re:

[Anonymous Coward]

Python is English-like in the sense that VB.NET is English-like, which is to say, nothing at all like English. It's clumsy, unnecessarily verbose, overlogical and obtuse. There's no artistry to it; every Python program looks exactly the same regardless of functionality or intent.

Perl is for poets. Python is for autistic geeks who wish the world were expressed in maths.

Re:

[abigor]

The world actually is expressed in math. I hate to break it to you. And in places that matter (ie not your bedroom), Perl is dying as companies grow sick of the costs of maintainability. Welcome to the real world.

Re:

[nuzak]

> Perl is dying as companies grow sick of the costs of maintainability.

They sure as fuck aren't moving to a language that doesn't even have the same capabilities of use strict;. Yeah, we all just love how python ignores typos in variable names because it has no concept of a declaration.

Re:Who The Hell Still Uses Perl?

[texwtf]

The fact that whitespace is dogmatized by the pyhon community makes the community
itself less attractive, and the language because of it. It sends the message that
it doesn't really matter what you want, the language is perfect and your code
is crap because you are too stupid to agree with how right the community is.

Guido could _easily_ put in some sort of pragma to allow other types of blocks, it's
only a matter of arrogance that stops him- coding with whitespace is the "right" way to do it.

There's also the matter of the parser. The last time I used Python everything was a syntax error, which gave little indication what was actually wrong with a piece of
code.

Re:

[rgravina]

Guido could _easily_ put in some sort of pragma to allow other types of blocks, it's
only a matter of arrogance that stops him- coding with whitespace is the "right" way to do it.

There is are very good reasons for having indentation indicate a block.

Firstly, code written by different programmers is consistently indented. C and Java programmers could argue for a millennia about where to put the curly brace, but in the end the argument is just trivial. If everyone did it the same way code would be much more r

Re:

[texwtf]

There are very good reasons not to. Thus, dogma. My argument is "everyone else does it the other way, maybe being flexible would be good." Your argument is "I am right and my way is good, so there shouldn't be any other way". That's Guido's argument too.

Re:

[fatphil]

I recommend you start a yahoogroup for the discussion of Python. The same applies to YAML advocates too, of course. Exchange a few snippets of code/data.

Hopefully you'll then realise how non-portable a white-space-based convention is.

Re:

[nuzak]

Python's a lot better about locating errors than it was in the 1.x series, including whitespace ones. I'd try it again if that's all that got to you. The whitespace thing still occasionally irks me, but it's pretty evenly balanced by not having to use semicolons.

I find python's "half open ranges" and lack of variable declaration far more irritating than anything else.

Re:

[radtea]

The fact that whitespace is dogmatized by the pyhon community makes the community
itself less attractive, and the language because of it

This put me off python for a long time, too. "Whitespace is not actually evil--it is just misunderstood" is a lesson I learned from SGML-based text processing, where concepts like "ignorable whitespace" reflect the reality of how strangely humans interpret such things.

But once you get over the fact that a fundamental aspect of the language's structure is based on a characte

Re:

[Lord Ender]

Guido could _easily_ put in some sort of pragma to allow other types of blocks

but he won't, because that would be stupid. It would be akin to having differently-sized railroad tracks depending upon the whim of the person laying them.

Only a PERL programmer would think that is a good idea :-)

Re:

[Intron]

The PHP syntax is very similar to Perl and C.

From the PHP Tutorial [w3schools.com]

Re:Bah, who the hell still uses perl?

[ThatDamnMurphyGuy]

No, professionals write good code, regardless of the language. There is just as much shitty Python/Ruby out there as there is Perl.

Re:

[LM741N]

Yes, but at least with Python you can read and understand the shit- and then fix it if need be.

Re:Bah, who the hell still uses perl?

[soapbox]

fine, I'll feed the troll.

Parsing perl with wet-ware isn't always easy. Obfuscating your code in the name of optimization should be countered with good commenting. Every useful script will have to be maintained, and the grandparent post is totally correct. I work minor miracles with Perl; or, miracles to me, anyway--I couldn't have created my dissertation data without Fortran--specifically g95 [g95.org]--and Perl.

I know there are lots of useful languages out there. Every language has its fanboys. Heck, I liked the PDP-11 macro language a lot. If people produce useful code with Perl, don't complain about it; be glad for them.

Re:

[KermodeBear]

As true as that may be, I have never heard of any other language be referred to as a "write only language".

Re:Bah, who the hell still uses perl?

[Jah-Wren Ryel]

As true as that may be, I have never heard of any
other language be referred to as a "write only language".

The only point that citing your personal ignorance makes is that you are ignorant. [wikipedia.org]

Re:

[KermodeBear]

Ah, and now I can say that I've only known three languages to be referenced to as write only - Perl being one of them (TECO and APL being the other two).

Regardless, even though the reputation is a shared one that doesn't make it a good thing.

Re:

[pilkul]

Oh boo hoo, he hasn't heard of these two random other languages, one of which is obscure and the other long-dead. He must really be an incompetent fool: anyone who wasn't around in the days of TECO is. What was your point again?

Re:Bah, who the hell still uses perl?

[Anonymous Coward]

So you have never used APL, eh?

Perl is derided by people who quite frankly don't have a clue.

We get lots of flammage from the Java and Python programmers that seem to be unable to grasp that when they try to justify their language choices by putting down other languages, they demonstrate how clearly idiotic their choices are. They cannot come up with something better than "line noise"? My god, have they not heard of the obfuscated code contest?

One can write unreadable code in any language. Perl is not unique in this regard. Moreover, Perl itself does not admit more unreadable code than other languages. The regex engine in Perl is a language unto itself. You don't need to use it, ever. But once you do, you realize how incredibly powerful it is. And you learn how to parse it, and even more scary, emit it, in your head. What takes hundreds of lines in Java (well what doesnt) becomes single digit number of lines in Perl.

In my career, I have used APL, Assembly (x86, 8080/Z80, 6502, 6800, F8, ...), Basic, C, C++, Fortran (66,77,90,95), Gauss, Icon, Java, maxima/macsyma, mumath, pascal, perl, prolog, python, ruby, R, VB and probably a few I forget in there. The big idea I have learned is to never force fit a tool to a problem. Select the right tool for the right problem. And go from there.

Perl is wonderful in that it allows for rapid application development, has a really huge library to draw from (www.cpan.org), orders of magnitude larger than competitive languages, an active developer base, an active contributer base, is portable (you can run Perl anywhere, windows, linux, mac, Cray, AIX, ...). It is not the perfect language for everything though, there are some missing bits.

Ruby is neat, though I am amused by those in the Java community running over to it, thinking it is better than Perl. It is slightly different, but the syntax is actually quite close to perl. Learning it isn't hard once you know Perl, you can go back and forth quite easily. The problem in Ruby's case is speed. This hopefully will improve over time.

Python is hard for me to use. I am reminded of BASIC on IBM PCs. Some people like it, I don't. Use it if you must.

Java has always felt to me to be a solution in search of a problem. I haven't seen things that are being done in Java that couldn't be done more quickly and efficiently in other languages. Java has developed a cult-like following. Many people drank the koolaid, committed company resources to it, and poo-pooed other, better solutions. Only to discover that each "advance" meant to deliver more performance dug people in deeper to the hole, made the systems harder and more expensive to develop. And until recently, the vast majority of people were in significant denial over the fact that java was and is just a marketing gimmick for Sun. They drank the koolaid.

Fortran ... spent 15 years developing Fortran code. May it never reach 16 years.

APL. You want write only? Parse this: +/x

In APL, we wrote complex calculation systems in very few lines. It was a tremendously powerful language.

In Fortran we wrote complex calculation systems in quite a few lines. Not very powerful for IO, really sucked for this.

In Perl we drive complex calculation codes written in almost any language. Insanely powerful. Expressive and concise syntax, reads well when well written. Good IO, good networking, good system hooks. Can use MVC and web tools, Jifty even comes with a pony.

Underestimating Java

[GunFodder]

Perl is a good development language. I especially appreciate the transparency of scripting languages - if something goes wrong I can examine the source immediately. But I think you underestimate the power of Java. CPAN is good, but the resources available to a Java developer are even more extensive, thanks to the combined efforts of the major software players and the open source community. Java-specific development tools are leaps ahead of most other languages. When a serious amount of effort is required to

Indeed.

[Ayanami Rei]

Java is well-suited for large projects with fairly well defined requirements (and potentially complex interactions between objects/components).

If the requirements are ill defined, or the system small enough to likely be confined to a single box, or the object model relatively simple (few types, lots of instances) then perl is the first thing I think of...

Unless the object model is regular and layered, then I think ruby.
Unless there is a need for blistering IO and syscalltastic goodness with function overloa

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[Archibald Buttle]

Many businesses consider C and C++ to be "write only languages" and ban it's use in custom applications encoding business logic.

I personally know of far more businesses that consider C/C++ to be "write only" and consider Perl in the same way.

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[Lord Ender]

I code in Perl for a living. I code in Python and Ruby for fun.

While many languages have excess baggage (like semicolons) simply because their designers didn't want to stray too far from the languages that inspired them, Perl is the only language out there that is made up entirely of this baggage. It's a Frankenstein's Monster of dead language ideas.

Also, Perl, above all other languages I have used, Perl seems to have been been designed with the philosophy "complexity is good." Today, this philosophy is alm

Re:

[daeg]

Your post reads like a badly written Perl script, albeit with less punctuation.

Re:

[doom]

Why is there always so much Perl bashing that goes on here.

Because you see, despite the fact that programmers like to pretend that they're supremely rational they're actually as faddish as a bunch of teenagers.

Re:

[Fastolfe]

That, or the self-described programmers posting on Slashdot really are a faddish bunch of teenagers.

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[crucini]

ASCII-based formats solve the issue of data transmission between two unknown sources...

Indeed. XML is great at bridging gaps. Programmers with very different languages, platforms and viewpoints can exchange it. However, I've become increasingly aware of the space and time hit. Which depends, of course, on the app.

Actually, as long as the sender and receiver are in C, XML has not been the bottleneck for me yet. I do have one Perl XML sender (using XML::Simple) which is a bottleneck.

One way to solve the