Perl

[Toby Johnson]

Kenneth Porter wrote:
> I use a sendmail "milter" (mail filter) written in Perl 
> (http://mimedefang.org/) and the author indicated once that he would 
> have preferred to write it in Tcl as it's a more robust language and 
> Perl has some dark corners that cause problems in long-running processes.
>
> I find Perl's philosophy of more than one way to do things to itself 
> be problematic, because I don't find a lot of guidance in why one 
> should choose one approach over another.
>
> I do most of my coding in C++, and look longingly at Java, especially 
> now that Sun has open-sourced it. (There are a few things it can't 
> open-source because of 3rd party license encumbrances. But people are 
> looking for alternatives to those parts.) Given all the tools and 
> libraries available for Java, why would one choose C#? (I'm not 
> religious about languages. My big fear is vendor lock-in. Mono's 
> biggest threat seemed to be the potential for MS patent "mines".)

Of course IANAL but the fact that C# is an ECMA standard makes me feel 
pretty good about coding in it. It's ironic that most Linux distros 
these days have better out-of-the-box support for C# than they do for 
Java! Of course now that Java is FOSS I'm sure that will change very 
quickly.

I used to be firmly in the distrust-everything-Microsoft-touches camp 
but I've been pulling back from there over the past several years. I 
think they really do realize that they need to continue expanding the 
ecosystem around their technologies, which (as much as they wish weren't 
true) includes *nix interoperability. So I really don't personally think 
there will be any MS patent mines coming down the road for C#, any more 
than there is that same potential for pretty much every piece of 
software written by anyone these days. It's Mutually Assured Destruction 
all over again, with all sides building up their nuclear arsenals of 
patents, not wanting to push the button, but being ready if someone else 
does. :)

So to answer your question, why I would choose C# over Java (since 
really they are virtually identical) is that Visual Studio 2005 is 
simply the best development environment I have ever worked with. I just 
have lots of fun coding and debugging in it, using Edit and Continue, 
Immediate window, the various variable visualizers, etc. The only 
Java-capable IDE I've used is Eclipse, which is also a great program 
(and has some features I wish VS did, such as the ability to override 
config settings on a per-project basis), but it's just not quite as 
polished IMO.

That, and I've used C# much more simply because that's what my current 
employer uses. Again, this is all my personal experience; I don't want 
to disparage Java at all. I used to think Perl was the greatest thing 
since sliced bread but after working for quite a while in a 
strongly-typed, true OO language I see its shortcomings much better. I 
still love it for quick and dirty hack jobs but I doubt I'd use it again 
for anything as complex as this project.

toby