[plug] programming

[Ben New]

OK....  to everyone who has put me right ;-)

Firstly I'd like to say that I had no idea the mandrake config tools 
were Perl, or frozen bubble.  And the volume accounting that Paul 
mentions sounds like it would have to run continually like a daemon - or 
is it only the server child process that is Perl?  Anyway you learn 
something every day (especially on this list :-)) - I had never really 
seen Perl outside the context of cgi, db and filesystem access (which 
are still its most commonly used functionalities I'd guess).

As for the definition of a filter, I would classify most of the examples 
given by Derek and Jens as data filters.  They all take (text) data as 
input and produce (text) data as output.  True, the Perl modules are 
doing extra work like querying db's or reading cgi data or calling the 
system to execute an external process (like sendmail), but the actual 
application (script) written by you, the programmer, in Perl, is a 
filter, at least according to my definition.  In all those cases (where 
the input is from a db or cgi or something, and the output is html or 
xml or to a db, etc) its definitely not a gui application that you're 
writing.  Perl also apparently stands for "practical extraction and 
reporting language" ;-)

Getting back to what I was originally trying to say (obviously 
ineffectively since everyone missed the point :-)):  If you are looking 
to learn a language to write GUI applications (which is what the 
original poster was after) you wouldn't make Perl your first choice.

I think every language is designed for a limited class of application.  
Even Java, the so-called solution for everything from your microwave to 
your enterprise solutions, simply isn't suitable for a large number of 
problems (eg system programming, device drivers, etc).  Perl is great 
for many things but not so great with guis.

Regards,
Ben


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