Re: Harnessing Perl Scripts within a Project
Re: Harnessing Perl Scripts within a Project
- Subject: Re: Harnessing Perl Scripts within a Project
- From: Jens Alfke <email@hidden>
- Date: Mon, 05 Nov 2012 16:47:15 -0800
On Nov 5, 2012, at 2:59 PM, John Delacour <email@hidden> wrote:
> I am interested in your comment that “this isn't usually a productive thing to do”, because I very soon have to decide whether to devote all my time to getting to grips with ObjC or continue dreaming that I can do most of the work in Perl.
Can we skip the flame-bait please? I could just as easily flame Perl back (one of my least favorite languages ever) but that wouldn’t be productive.
> Coming to the verbosity and clumsiness of ObjC after the simplicity, power and conciseness of Perl is, for me, a horrible shock.
Nonetheless, learning different languages is a good idea. They all have pluses and minuses. I agree that Objective-C isn’t as good for munging text or files as Perl is (or Ruby or Python). It is however very good for implementing GUIs, and it’s very readable, and it generates fast and compact code. Furthermore, the verbosity is less of an issue because of Xcode’s excellent auto-complete.
> From what I’ve seen so far, it looks as if I shall need to write twenty or thirty times as much ugly code in ObjC as I would need to write to build the same application in Perl. Nevertheless I accept that that is only one aspect of productivity and would like to hear what the downside is.
I really think that’s an exaggeration, and yes, I have written significant amounts of code in Perl-like scripting languages. Nonetheless, I’m sure there will be more code to write. The upside is that the app will run a lot faster than it would have in Perl.
One compromise you might consider is using Ruby, which has pretty decent integration with Cocoa. (Ditto for Python, but Ruby is more Perl-esque.) It’s possible to write Cocoa apps entirely in those languages.
—Jens
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