Re: [xml-dev] parsing markup with Perl

[Arjun Ray <arjun.ray@verizon.net>]

[Default] On Sun, 09 Feb 2014 07:54:24 -0500, Michael Sokolov
<msokolov@safaribooksonline.com> wrote:

| "No more RSI!" 

Heh.  Won't see that in the brochure, though.

| Who cares if your code is unreadable and undebuggable.  If you're 
| sane, you'll use Perl primarily for one-time text-processing tasks.

But Perl is quite useful beyond that limited domain, too. Examples of
non-trivial systems built in Perl, back in the 20-C, with long shelf
life: Majordomo, Minivend.  CPAN is your friend.
 
| I will confess to having built a complex account/subscription 
| management system including a web application in 1999 that is 
| still in operation today in Perl,

That seems to have a popular problem domain back then.  In early '94,
we (James Gleick's Pipeline Network) hired a consultant to develop a
system to track our customer accounts.  He anounced that it would be
in Perl.  We didn't demur.  Unfortunately, what he delivered (more
than a little late) didn't work too well.  We fired him, and quickly
hacked his stuff into working shape ourselves.  We were better DPHs
than he was, but because he was late, we also started using a system
Avi Friedman had written for Netaxs, his ISP startup in Philadelphia.
In hindsight, I'm surprised that we had to use homegrown systems at
all, but happy that we had something like Perl to meet a pressing
need.    

| So I think there are places for parsing markup with (perl) regexes.

I think the missing piece is an xpath evaluator.  

| [...] in the end I find that bad  taste knows no linguistic bounds. 
| Bad programmers will be bad.

Yep.