Perl is 25 years old today

Re:Perl is 25 years old today by jrockway on Tuesday December 18, 2012 @12:18PM (#4938436)

Not really true. Yesterday I was trying to debug resource-loading issues. In any normal programming language, you can just strace it and you'll see where the program is doing I/O and you can figure out where it's trying to load files from. But if everything is in a jar, you don't see any OS-level I/O happening when Java tries to load something, so you have to invent all-new tools just to figure things out. When you switch to Java you throw away 40 years of UNIX for a bunch of private methods implemented by summer interns at Sun 20 years ago. The third-party libraries are fine, but the core is not.

Also type erasure.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Perl is 25 years old today by jbooth on Tuesday December 18, 2012 @02:10PM (#4938998)

I agree but if we're comparing Java to Perl, type erasure is only slightly hacky compared to the whole 'bless' thing.

Funnily enough, they're both examples of the same problem, stitching new features onto a language that was not at all prepared for them.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Perl is 25 years old today by jebblue on Tuesday December 18, 2012 @07:39PM (#4940578)

I never used strace even when doing C and sometimes C++ and still managed. Eclipse can't be beaten for Java, C/C++, PHP, Perl, Ruby and Python development.

EDIT: I just used "strace /usr/bin/java -jar myjar.jar" and saw what looks IO but I'm not familiar with strace output yet. It looks like a handy utility though. Can you give an example of something that you expected to see but didn't when you tried it?

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Perl is 25 years old today by lucian1900 on Wednesday December 19, 2012 @12:07AM (#4941244)

While Java has many problems, I don't consider packages to be a wrong choice necessarily. Not all good choices will be introspectable with unix-y tools (like mmaping a vm's state into memory).

[ Parent | on HN ]