Perl: A Fast and Flexible Development Tool
Named for “the thing of great value” in one of the parables recorded by St. Matthew, Perl is one of our favorite languages.
Advantages
- Speed of programming: Perl allows for fast Web software development and improvements. There’s also a large collection of open source Perl libraries that can perform many common tasks; we can incorporate them into your software to speed development time. (An open source library is a software component that’s available free for all to use and modify.)
- Text processing power: For programs that need to process text, Perl is the gold standard. “Text” includes not only human languages such as English, but files in a wide range of formats–such as HTML and XML.
- Database interaction: Perl’s text-processing abilities make it a particularly good choice for interacting with databases.
- System integration: Perl is also particularly good for transforming the output of one program into the input of another.
Disadvantages
- Moderate efficiency: Perl is less appropriate for software that will be run extremely frequently—many thousands or millions of times per day—because Perl programs typically consume a lot of RAM and processing power. This resource usage doesn’t matter much when the program is run less frequently.
There are ways around this limitation. For instance, we sometimes program most of a software application in Perl, but take the resource-intensive parts of the software and program them separately in C++, then have the main Perl program use those optimized C++ libraries.
Choosing Perl
Perl is a great choice for a wide range of development projects. As noted above, it’s not the best when great resource efficiency is needed; even then, it may work for the parts of a project that are less resource-demanding.
