March 3, 2011

Leaving perl

So, I was reviewing one of my happiest perl-hacks, the Roskilde band finder, and due to a combination of perl line noise and my own inadequate design I simply failed at extending the hack like I wanted to. That's not what your goto quickfixer tool is supposed to offer you, and so I was disappointed and it felt like I lost some ability right there, as perl refused to be friendly to the task at hand.
I was a bit dismayed, because I have after all done a lot of nice little things with perl, and more so, because of the convenience of habit I have after a decade of perl scripts. I've moved a lot of my scripting to ruby, but ruby fails at delivering the level of brevity I have in perl. Or, ruby used to at least. Lately I've been rethinking that point of view. For sure, I'd rather write Eventmachine servers than POE servers. ActiveRecord outside of Rails isn't so bad. And I just discovered mashup-artist HTTParty. Decide on a "one file only" web framework* and I'm pretty much there.

I still need a couple of niceties** - but I think some DSLy goodness fixes most of what I'm missing. But I'm going to start migrating the Roskilde tool and I'll let you know what it ends up looking like.

* I think just Sinatra with erb will do fine.
** Something that does AWK inside ruby, basically - perl is what does AWK inside perl all on its own.

Posted by Claus at March 3, 2011 1:52 PM
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