It's just Yet Another Example of someone doing an opinion piece and dressing it up so he doesn't look as clueless as he is. He's assigned weighted scores to qualitative values, he's arbitrarily picked language features to compare, and worst of all, he's presented numeric scores like they actually mean anything at all.

As a 'here's how to do XXX in 20 different languages' it's actually not bad. As a comparison piece, it's clearly a waste of time.

As for Perl coming out on top, have a look at Paul Graham's pieces on good languages.

PS - This has already been discussed here (i think, maybe just in chatterbox) and on use.perl.org (for sure).

update: s{-e "/etc/mtab" or exit 1}{exit !-e "/etc/mtab"} s{-r "/etc/mtab" or exit 1}{exit !-r "/etc/mtab"}

This has already been discussed here

It has indeed: here are a couple of threads I know about:

• Use Perl wisely, not cleverly
• Perl speed VS. other languages

- another intruder with the mooring of the heat of the Perl

I mailed the author with some issues and have recieved a reply. One part is relevent to what you just said:

i fixed. For example, for   % perl -le 'print $ARGV[0]' i take the length of   -l print $ARGV[0]

But the fact remains that he has NOT been generous to Perl. In fact the way I read the code hes been ungenerous to perl. Consider all the examples that involve or exit 1 (which is not normal idion to return an error value to the OS in perl, unless that error MUST specifically be 1, any sane programmer would use die,) or the fact that in many of the examples he includes the invocation in the perl examples but not in any of the other examples.

But what really gets me is the File::Find example. His code reads to me the way someone would write it if they deliberately want to disadvantage perl.

use File::Find;

find({ no_chdir => 1, 
       wanted => sub {
           if (($o = $_) =~ s/\.c$/.o/ 
               && -M $_ <= -M $o) {
               print "compiling $_ to $o\n";
               system qw(gcc -c -o), $o, $_;
           }
} }, '.');
[download]

Why the no_chdir here, or the options hash at all?

use File::Find;

find sub {
           if (($a = $_) =~ s/\.c$/.o/ 
               && -M $_ <= -M $a) {
               print "compiling $_ to $a\n";
               system qw(gcc -c -o), $a, $_;
           }
}, '.';
[download]

So, by my reading of this once these changes are made Perl wins.



---
demerphq


First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.
-- Gandhi

Actually, I missed that in the File::Find example. In fact either the Perl test (and some others) is invalid or the shell test (and some others) is.
The shell script compiles recursively, and the Perl has a check to avoid compiling recursively. One of them violates the goal of the script

As far as the exit stuff goes, I realized that it could be written better as:


exit !-e "/etc/mtab"
[download]

I emailed the author with the exit changes (and reiterated your File::Find findings). Hopefully he will resolve them.


-pete
"Worry is like a rocking chair. It gives you something to do, but it doesn't get you anywhere."

(Note to self: try to make that sentence run on even longer ...)

Your example replacements are insufficient, because in those cases the string must be printed with a newline.

For 'print first arg', for example, it should be:

  print shift, "\n"
(or maybe:
  print "$ARGV[0]\n"
)
[download]

Hugo

print shift,$/;

Really, it's combining bash and perl that is great fun. for example:

[me@host]$ more `which whichpm`
#!/bin/sh
perl "-M$1" -le '$_=shift; s|::|/|g; print $INC{"$_.pm"}' "$1"
[me@host]$
[download]

Writing 'whichpm' in perl alone would take a fair bit more space.

And everyone knows that I love perl command line switches :-D

------------
:Wq
Not an editor command: Wq
[download]

Or just: perldoc -l

$ alias whichpm='perldoc -l'
$ whichpm HTML::Template
/usr/lib/perl5/site_perl/5.8.0/HTML/Template.pm
[download]

-Blake

Since it states that its realy competetion of script features of programming and perl actualy ties for second falling only a point short of tie for first it looks quite fair. Some of the perl code isn't what you might right, but i'm willing to bet the same holds true for other languages on that list. All in all I think its interesting but I don't think anyone is going to choose what to program in based on that.

These types of contests cannot be truly done by one individual unless that person is an expert in all the languages tested. We did a head to head at work once, and took the same set of requirements and two of us wrote the programs in two separate languages. First to meet all the requirements won. Trying to have the same programmer do the same thing just doesn't work since their biases and knowledge (or lack thereof) get in the way of the competition being fair. You tend to get the results you wanted in the first place.