[plug] programming

[Jens Porup]

On Thu, Sep 18, 2003 at 02:21:46PM +0800, Ben New wrote:
> How so?
> 
> I've never seen a desktop application written in Perl...  I have seen it 
> used it in many places as a data filter, such as between a form and a db 
> or filesys, or between a db or fs and a report, or between a form and 
> sendmail (etc).  The other class I can think of is server application 
> and I haven't seen too many of them written in Perl either :-)
> 
> Maybe that's just how *I've* seen it used before though...  Examples of 
> other types of apps written in perl anyone?

As a full-time Perl developer, I can only tell you what I use Perl for:

        * writing web server applications that interface with databases
          including Interbase/Firebird and MySQL. Perl is tops at this!
          Far faster to write than VBScript or other Microsoft nonsense,
          more robust than PHP, and far fewer lines of code than verbose
          Java. Perl packages like Template::Toolkit make extensible,
          100K+ lines of code feasible and, dare I say it, manageable.
        
        * automating MS Office Applications. "Say what?" I hear you
          say? We take large amounts of statistical data and create
          Powerpoint presentations and Excel spreadsheets from several
          hundred up to several thousand. Perl's Win::OLE package
          gives us access to the MS Office API, and our development
          time in Perl is at least three times faster in Perl than in
          Visual Basic, because Perl is a far superior
          text-manipulation language.

        * data munging, data munging, data munging. As Damian Conway
          says in his "Data Munging with Perl" book, "It's a dirty
          job, but someone's got to do it. And it looks like that
          someone is you."

I do know of developers who use Perl/Tk to create fully-fledged GUI
front-ends, but I don't have any experience with this personally.

Cheers,

Jens
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