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Re: parsing markup with Perl

  • From: Rick Jelliffe <rjelliffe@allette.com.au>
  • To: xml-dev@lists.xml.org
  • Date: Sat, 8 Feb 2014 16:20:27 +1100

Re:  parsing markup with Perl

The stackoverflow heading is so misleading. The heading talks about regular expressions and his evidence is a Perl script. He may as well say he can parse html using plus and minus on the same evidence! What a crock.

Fill in your usual boilerplate on desperate Perl hacker here.

About 15 years ago I had a job working on the Perl scripts of one of the big 3 legal publishers here. They had 3 people trying to find bugs and two fixing them and one manager.

They had unreadable code and it was driving them into the ground. My takeaway was that Perl as it stood then required infeasibly much commenting to be maintainable: it is hacker friendly which means you need extra discipline: code reviews and comment audits. (The very things you probably were trying to avoid needing by using a scripting language, which you bought into because you thought you were getting flexible and agile.)

It was a bad gig. The writing was on the wall. In fact that company did get driven into the ground: they were bought up by my current employer. And I now find myself working on new systems for those same products.

I am probably not at liberty to divulge the dolorous history of Perl here since then. They did move text and event processing out to Omnimark leaving the higher shell functions in Perl. Typical 1990s. I think I can say that our recent implementations certainly don't use Perl.

The issue for corporate coding is not whether a well-managed disciplined group of experienced programmers can turn out maintainable Perl (or any language) code with the benefit of hindsight, but how fast the code sinks into maintainability as soon as someone drips the ball (wrong design, wrong review process, wrong experience, wrong texting, etc).  I don't think Perl has a good track record, based on what I have seen at least. Imho it is too risky.

I am finding the combination of PowerShell and 'xslt2 pretty good at the moment, as an alternative. Actually, the split where XSLT2 does transformations and the shell/job queue does higher level operations helps a separation of concerns.

Rick

On 08/02/2014 5:20 AM, "Ihe Onwuka" <ihe.onwuka@gmail.com> wrote:
Fantabulous.

No not the article, but the StackOverflow answer it linked to.

On Fri, Feb 7, 2014 at 5:42 PM, Simon St.Laurent <simonstl@simonstl.com> wrote:
> More fun for the crowd here.
>
> <http://programming.oreilly.com/2014/02/parsing-html-with-perl-2.html>
>
> Thanks,
> --
> Simon St.Laurent
> http://simonstl.com/
>
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