Punctuation Heavy Languages

A couple of years ago, I had a chance to implement a small application that would bring big benefits to my employer at the time. This was an application of minimal complexity and business rules, and followed a familiar pattern:

• Small back end database
• Small user community
• Large savings in time for both users and IT personnel
• Automate a manual process
• Provide an audit trail

One of the “approved” languages of the company was Perl. While I was familiar with Perl, my direct reports had never used it. As I set off to implement the application in Perl, I realized that it was much too punctuation heavy to expect a folks to use. Hashes of Hashes used waaaayyy to many curly braces. I set out to have a curly brace and colon cleansing, and pulled out the latest language / framework in my arsenal – Ruby on Rails. The app was easy to implement, and equally easy to understand, even for developers who had never seen the language.

I would have loved to use Perl, but Rails was too right for this project. If I’d had more performance concerns, or a more seasoned set of Perl developers, Perl would have been the right answer.

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