If you've had any exposure to Perl, you've probably heard of Tom Christiansen.
Twenty years ago, I wrote the letter below to him. He was kind enough to suggest that I write more.
Well I'm still coding in Perl now, more or less all day every day.
I'm not sure that was what he meant. :)
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Date: Thu, 18 Nov 1999 23:46:19 +0000 (GMT)
From: "G.W. Haywood" <xxxxxxx@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
To: Tom Christiansen <xxxxxxx@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Subject: Re: using function prototypes w/ mod_perl.
Hi there,
If pressed, I'd admit I'm a C programmer.
I probably speak C as well as I speak English, having been at it since it was invented.
Yes, I'll admit I'm over 40. Well over.
C has got better over the years. To start with the compilers were a bit dodgy and the linkers didn't know about type.
Now that's all sorted out you can write code knowing that if you pass a string to a function that's expecting a double you'll never get it past `make'.
As a result, some of my programmes have been running for over a decade without stopping.
Some of my code sits monitoring nuclear reactors and patients in hospital laboratories.
My financial well-being is tied to my proficiency in C because my software currently sends out invoices for any of the 120,000 products that I now sell to a sizeable portion of my 18,000 customers, daily.
It tells me who owes me money, how much, since when, and where I must go if necessary to get it from them.
Sometimes it's necessary.
It has to work. If I need a program that's bullet-proof, that will take absolutely anything that's thrown at it, then I will pull out my trusty old C libraries and get coding.
When it's finished, a hyperactive kitten jumping on the keyboard will result in nothing more sinister than a couple of bleeps.
Such extreme duress might possibly cause an invoice to be printed that should not have been printed, (although it wouldn't make it out of the door), but it definitely wouldn't put an entry in the error log.
In short, I believe in C because I've been at it for 25 years.
Well, I'm new to perl. About 18 months now. You'd think I'd hate it because it's such a completely different thing from C, but, I don't.
I love it. I can do things in perl in twenty minutes that would take hours in C, if it were realistic even to consider coding them that way.
What will it be like when I get to be competent?
When I talk to that absolutely fantastic interpreter it talks back to me, telling me where I made silly mistakes, sometimes showing me a better way to do it, holding my hand as I stumble along.
At 400MHz, it's quick enough.
Would I convert any of my hardcore financial stuff to perl?
Would I put perl in a diagnostics laboratory? On a reactor?
Never.
But would I mess about with C to get something running on our Website? Why bother?
There are so many things waiting to go wrong between the user's browser (which is probably a M1croS0ft product so it will almost certainly crash within the next ten minutes or so)
and my servers (which probably will not survive even the most ham-fisted of attempts by a second-rate undergraduate to gain illegal access) that the idea of my writing a Robust Piece Of Code to do something as mundane as serving pages is simply laughable.
The Web is moving so fast I'm sure that if I try to do what I need to do in a language like C, I'll never catch it. So I say let's get it done, make a few bob, and on to the next job.
Tell your C programming friends that function prototypes are for people in air-traffic control and petrochemicals.
If they're really fussy, tell them they should be looking at RTL/2 anyway. Tell them what the p in perl stands for. It doesn't stand for `prototypes'.
Kind regards,
Ged.
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