[thelist] An Informal Perl Survey

Jeremy Ashcraft ashcraft at 13monkeys.com
Fri Mar 1 10:10:09 CST 2002


On Thu, 2002-02-28 at 23:21, Mohammad Burhan Khalid wrote:
> Hello list :
>
> 	As some of you might have noticed, I was having slight issues with Perl
> today, which got me to thinking, what is the best use for this powerful
> language? What is it best suited for?

Well, perl is a munging of sh,sed,awk,c and some other stuff.  Its got
the power of sh with the flow and ease of a high level language(like
C).  Its primary use in its early days was simply to manipulate text.  I
swear by it for any system administration scripting or daily/weekly
maintenence routines(cron) that need done.

> I know that it has been around for a
> long time, and for a while was the king of CGI based internet exchanges.
> But, I wonder with the advent of new technologies (ASP, PHP, CF, etc.),
> which can do pretty much the same things as Perl; has Perl become outdated?

I'd say that Perl/CGI in the traditional sense has become alittle
outdated in that the performance/overhead associated with it is high.
Now if you use mod_perl, along with something like Mason, then that's a
different story.......

> I realize that many *nix people swear by the language, and it is used for
> many reporting purposes. I had to learn it as part of my Linux+
> Certification course.  I am speaking from a web developer point of view.
> What are your best uses of Perl?

I love it for any type of sys admin task I wish to automate.  I even
have a nightly perl script that runs to perform all of our backups.  The
possibilities are endless....

--

jeremy
http://www.webhack.com




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