Re: Thoughts on the future direction of OfflineIMAP

[Jean-Michel Hiver <jhiver@xxxxxxxxx>]

> I'll assume John's reasons for this are the same as mine: Perl is
> simply not suitable for large projects due to it's tendency to become
> unmaintainable. I know that with extensive style rules you can
> mitigate this somewhat, but Perl's syntax and There Is More Than One
> Way To Do It philosophy are working against it when scaling beyond
> simple programs.

I agree that it can be hard to read advanced Perl.

However CPAN is the true strength of Perl. You can probably find most of
the functionality you need on CPAN.

I found myself that splitting a too-big program into independant CPAN
modules, with their own makefile, test suite and POD documentation makes
a really big difference.

That being said, to reuse your terms I am a Java-to-Perl convert and I
appreciate the flexibility of Perl. However I do think that Python quite
neat. But then I also find OCaml very neat.

It's just that Perl through CPAN provides more functionality "out of the
box" than anything else out there.

Anyway it's a matter of taste. I'll use offlineimap whatever it's
written in. I've wanted to play more with OCaml for a while, so if
you're ever re-writing it in that I'd like to try and give a hand.

Cheers,
-- 
Building a better web - http://www.mkdoc.com/
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Jean-Michel Hiver
jhiver@xxxxxxxxx  - +44 (0)114 255 8097
Homepage: http://www.webmatrix.net/