Pretty often, in the mailing lists, people ask why should they use one solution instead of another. There is a similar discussion on mod_perl mailing list. While there are, as usual, a number of reasons to use Perl over Java, it gets interesting when it comes to examples and references. Particularly, these lines from reply by Perrin Harkins:
Amazon runs on Perl. Yahoo runs a lot of Perl. Ticketmaster is all
mod_perl. IMDB is Perl. All of these get tons more traffic than Slashdot.
Perl is WRITE-ONLY language. Java rocks!
win32,
Trolling again, eh?
Since I had my pint today, I’ll feed you. Perl is a very flexible language when it comes to syntax. That allows both for very ugly code and very nice code. Practice shows that any language can be misused. Yes, even Java. But when it comes to non-standard tasks (far beyond ‘Hello world’ programs) the flexibility of Perl syntax usually helps.
It all comes down to programmers, and not the language.
As to Java – I have yet to see it work well. Based on my experience I can say that Java is a good concept, theory if you will. None of the implementations have nailed it yet. The portability of it lacks far behind other approaches (such as C++, Perl and Python). The core of the language standards still remain closed and are covered under a limiting license (yes, read it sometime). For the rest of it, the overhead of virtual machine is not worth it.
Your exprience with it might be different. And I don’t have any problem with that. :)
Whaaat? Portability lacks? Eat my shirts. Eat them hard! It is by definition better than anything that exists on earth. And in practice too. Take thunderworx – people who develop in Perl all have Linux installed. People who (had been:) developing in Java mostly had Windows installed. Both Perl and Java apps are hosted on Linux. And not a single one of Java developers ever thought that any aspect of Java could work differently on Linux. Same byte code. Write once. Run everywhere. Java rocks! BTW ebay.com uses a lot of java.
Alexey,
Your example with Thunderworx developers is wrong. Some of them were running Linux, but not because of their development needs. Not at all. In fact, most of them didn’t. Igor still develops on Windows. Kyriacos does too. So does AlexB. Even if he wasn’t using Windows at that time, he does now. :)