Perl outreach

[James Laver]

On 27 Nov 2012, at 14:20, Edmund von der Burg <evdb at ecclestoad.co.uk> wrote:
> To be sure there are some thing that async is awful at. I love it for
> APIs and responding to web requests. Anything short and sweet and
> potentially blocking or concurrent.

For building a moderately complex REST API I found it tedious in the extreme. I'm currently building it in Perl with a view to replacing it with clojure past the prototype stage. Frankly if it weren't for the fact some parts of it require functionality for which the perl libraries are shit, I would keep it in perl and I'm far too lazy to bite off even more projects than the ones I currently have going.

I do not believe there is a better prototype language than perl unless your vision happens to fit precisely into the typical app model of something like rails (and mine really does not). Not that perl is only capable of prototypes, merely that my app has special needs on the macro scale and I'm lazy.

Oh, on the topic of node, I like npm. Npm feels like a JavaScript port of something written in perl.

> For the sequential testing of clicking on a web interface it was
> painful to the extreme. To the extent that I threw away all that code
> and started again using watir (http://watirwebdriver.com/). Which is
> Ruby. Who cares, it works!

I would reach for cucumber/capybara in that situation. Watir is nice but cucumber grew on me after a while.

/j

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