Wish Setup would accept my Perl

Wed Nov 7 16:12:00 GMT 2007

Brian Mathis wrote:
> How about if you are writing a Windows application? What if you need 
> to manipulate the Registry or access Win32::OLE objects? You certainly 
> need AS Perl for that. It's not hard to imagine why you'd need a 
> Windows-centric version.
Then you are obviously and decidedly writing non-portable code.
> Portability is not the be-all, end-all purpose of an application, and 
> eschewing it is not necessarily laziness. 
Portability was the issue I was describing. If you wish to talk about 
writing non-portable stuff then granted using something like AS Perl 
will actually help you achieve that goal. Have fun. Oh, and BTW I was 
speaking specifically about instances in my career where people have 
unwisely eschewed portability only to have it bite them in the ass later.
> It's actually pretty low on the list of priorities. Normally "getting 
> the job done" is higher on the list. For most people, the goal of 
> scripting is to accomplish a task, like data processing or automation. 
> Each of those goals is almost guaranteed to interact with some other 
> proprietary part of the system that is also not portable. That's the 
> difference between coding an app and scripting. Scripting is more 
> often the glue between other parts.
Those are the words of somebody who lacks vision and thinks only in 
terms of the problem directly before him.
> That's not to say that you can't also write a portable, full-blown 
> application in Perl, but that's coming from a different perspective. 
> Maybe that's where the differences lay here, in the perspective.
A Perl application or script or even glue code need not be "full-blown" 
to be portable. Portability is a function of seeing a specific task to 
do and doing it in a way that will work on multiple platforms. It's the 
opposite of a proprietary solution. That does not automatically mean a 
little script has suddenly become a full-blown application, rather it 
means that a script was written with more than one environment in mind.
-- 
Andrew DeFaria <http://defaria.com>
Music, I suppose, will be the thing that sustains me when I'm too old 
for sex, and not quite ready to meet God. - Dolly Parton
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