Re: [Bug-gne]Programming the front/backend

[Hook]

Bob Dodd wrote:
>
> --- Hook <address@hidden> wrote:
> [snip]
> > But there again, *any* language can be write-only if you get a bad
> > enough programmer. I've done the same kind of job with C, and wanted
> > to take a blunt instrument to the originator.
>
> True, but some languages positively revel in obfuscation, a sort of
> "encryption by plain text" :-)) I'd put Perl in with that lot (but well
> behind Forth...)

Perl and regular expressions can be horrific, true.  But, have you looked at
a sendmail config file lately?

> That said, out of our limited available/allowed languages, Perl is
> probably the obvious choice for implementing our CGI (or whatever...)
> scripts, and for dynamic generation of web pages. At least on the
> submissions side of things: I hold strong opinions when it comes to
> classifiers/search engines ;-)
>
> One thing I don't think we should be using Perl for, is organising the
> internals of the submitted entries. Perl isn't an efficient tool for
> "database" implementations, dbm files or no dbm files...

Databases are *not* dbm files (and vice versa) !  Perl and the right DBI
module, coupled with Apache and mod_perl gives sparkling perforrmance, and a
very short development cycle. Remember, Perl is optimised for handling text,
and that's what we're talking about here.

Paul