Re: porting with autotools

[Gary V. Vaughan]

On 28 Aug 2010, at 05:44, Reuben Hawkins wrote:
> I hear Perl is a nice language,

<rant>
Then you have been misinformed - Perl is a terrible language, positively
encouraging mixing of paradigms and writing of hardly readable or
maintainable code with bizarre unintuitive syntax. It is also in the
latter part of its life, with a full implementation of Perl 6 already
several years behind schedule, while the rest of the world has embraced
Python and Ruby (and even Erlang!!) instead.  IMHO that's actually a pity,
since Parrot, the Perl 6 runtime, offers an excellent way to migrate all
of your legacy code away from Perl once and for all - so I hope they do
manage at least one full release before the end! ;)
</rant>

Unfortunately, large parts of the core of Autoconf and Automake use
Perl extensively, so it is an existing dependency, which makes it a
not entirely unreasonable choice for additional Autotools scripts.

Fortunately, the existing Automake and Autoconf core Perl code is
written very well, and (so far) maintaining it has proven less of a
headache than rewriting it in a decent language.

Portable Bourne shell (especially with help from Autoconf's m4sh in the
style of other Autotool's shell code) is generally no more difficult to
write, also doesn't add additional dependencies either... And it will
continue to work well into the future when Perl finally withers in the
face of competition from far better languages.

But in the end it is a personal choice, and some people still prefer
Perl to Shell.

Cheers,
-- 
Gary V. Vaughan (address@hidden)

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