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Perl vs Visual Basic: What are the differences?
Syntax: One key difference between Perl and Visual Basic is their syntax. Perl is known for its concise and compact syntax, allowing for quick and easy scripting. On the other hand, Visual Basic has a more verbose syntax with a focus on readability and ease of understanding for beginners.
Platform: Another difference is the platform compatibility. Perl is a cross-platform language, meaning it runs on various operating systems such as Windows, Linux, and macOS. In contrast, Visual Basic is primarily designed for Windows operating systems, limiting its use on other platforms.
Community Support: Perl has a large and active community of developers who contribute to its open-source ecosystem, providing a wide range of libraries and modules for different functionalities. Visual Basic, while supported by Microsoft, may have a smaller community compared to Perl, resulting in fewer resources and support.
Usage: Perl is commonly used for system administration, web development, and network programming due to its powerful text processing capabilities. Visual Basic, on the other hand, is often used for developing Windows applications, especially in the business and enterprise software domains.
Scripting vs. Programming: Perl is known as a scripting language, allowing for rapid prototyping and automation tasks. Visual Basic, on the other hand, is generally considered a programming language with a focus on building larger applications with graphical user interfaces (GUIs).
Learning Curve: The learning curve for Perl is usually steeper for beginners due to its flexible syntax and various ways to accomplish tasks. In comparison, Visual Basic is often seen as more beginner-friendly with its intuitive development environment and robust debugging tools.
In Summary, the key differences between Perl and Visual Basic lie in their syntax, platform compatibility, community support, usage, scripting capabilities, and learning curve.
I intend to use a programming language which I'll use as AWS runtime and write a script that will comb through tons of files in a directory and its subdirectories and search for simple text regular expressions and process and write the matches in a file as output. I have heard that Perl is good for regex based search but I also want the performance to be good as it will have to go through tons of files for IO. In this post: https://filia-aleks.medium.com/aws-lambda-battle-2021-performance-comparison-for-all-languages-c1b441005fd1, I see that Rust works well as AWS Lambda runtime with very good performance. Which one should I choose as my AWS lambda runtime for this problem? Golang is also an option as it is fast as per the above link.
I used to work in a Perl shop and must admit that the language is very simple for tasks like these, but as you mentioned it's not fast at execution time. I'm now a Go programmer professionally but I taught myself the language while in college purely out of interest and eventually found my way to the job, not the other way around. I've recently been learning a little rust because of how much that language comes up in conversations around Go. I find the concept of the borrow checker nice but I have to admit I feel lost like I am in most flavors of new fancy framework js. That's not to say Rust is really anything like js, but the learning appears the same to me as someone who's convinced they could learn just about any programming language if it was necessary (over time I've seen procedural, OOP, declarative and functional stuff but never programming logic outside of the prolog code I wrote in school).
Go isn't made for your specific task at hand but it's a very easy language to pick up and it has good directory traversal standard library code and good regex (even though with time perl's has been optimized to be faster and I think it's written in C++) but more than anything Go is "cloud native" programming in that an awful lot of new microservice tech stacks are centered around it, docker and kubernetes are written in it, and there's a thriving community whose focus is generally web-first and performance-oriented. This means for your use case there might already be a large cohort of gophers that have asked the stackoverflow questions for you
I personally would push you towards the NYT Profiler for Perl before I would towards Rest, but that's because I know you wouldn't waste any time being able to get to the task at hand and then make it go faster, and I expect all but a few rustaceans would be able to do so with the same speed.
Whatever you pick I wish you the very best of luck!
Pros of Perl
- Lots of libraries72
- Open source66
- Text processing61
- Powerful54
- Unix-style49
- Regex47
- Stable37
- Concise syntax32
- Hackerish29
- Easy to use22
- Swiss army chainsaw16
- Code Less Do More13
- CPAN12
- Freedom9
- All purpose8
- Readability5
- Familiar5
- Many ways to do it5
- Community5
- Object-Oriented4
- Modular4
- Smart (does alot for you)4
- Postmodern3
- It's the best one-off task language3
- For a man2
- Good man pages2
- Auto case variables1
- Single Source Library (CPAN)1
- Multi-threaded support1
- Multiparadigm1
- C-style1
- Hashes1
Pros of Visual Basic
- ALGOL-like syntax makes code more readable5
- XML Literals3
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Cons of Perl
- Messy $/@/% syntax4
- No exception handling3
- Bad OO support2
- "1;"2
- No OS threads2
- Variables are global by default1
- Copy-on-create for interpreter-based threads1
- Barewords1
- Errors/warnings are ignored by default1
Cons of Visual Basic
- Specific to the microsoft platform4
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