[Zope] Re: Perl and Zope

Tom Neff tneff@bigfoot.com
Thu, 25 May 2000 15:37:53 -0400


As one of the original Perl Hackers I agree that this irrational Perl Hate
Minute stuff is silly.  To some extent language preferences are religious,
but that doesn't mean we need a holy war!  My response to the "I emigrated
penniless from my home country rather than use Perl, now you want to profane
Zope, I will immolate myself" wailing is, frankly, g_e_t__a__l_i_f_e.  Perl
was born as a slack hack but it's grown up and you can produce great, clean,
readable apps in it with a modicum of effort.  You can also knock off some
kinds of quick and dirty real world applets in a few (non-obfuscated) lines,
where a "purer" OO language needs several non-obvious paragraphs and/or
advanced tricks.  On the other hand, you can write bad Perl and give people
headaches.  You can also do this in Python.

Will the availability of Perl methods mean that fewer people learn Python?
Probably, but it will be a smaller percentage of a bigger user "pie."

My primary worry (if you're listening, Digicool) is that integrating the
Python and Perl runtime environments on various platforms will lead to
unexpected conflicts and performance problems.  For example, will threading
be enforced properly?  If memory leaks, whose memory is it?  If Perl
releases a new version, will Zope admins need to hold back until it's
cleared for use with Zope?