Another new arrival

[dsheroh]

Howdy, all!

I ran across this site from a link over on Dream.In.Code's "Game Programming" forum.  Looks like there's a bit of good information around here on game design and management of online game sites, so I think I'll stick around.

We'll see how involved I get in the discussions of coding details, though.  On the one hand, I've been writing small games since forever and have put up a couple web games over the years, although nothing really came of them, and I've been doing professional software development for a decade and a half, so I don't need to be asking about how to write code.  On the other, pretty much everyone talking about code here is talking about PHP, which I do my best to avoid, so I don't expect to be able to answer language-specific PHP questions for anyone else.

My current personal project is a space trader that I'm calling "PSG" ("Psychic Space Game") at the moment in lieu of a real name.  It started off as an educational aside to introduce myself to Moose and KiokuDB (Perl is my language of choice), but quickly took on a life of its own.  But I suppose I'll go over to the Projects forum and talk more about it over there, since it would feel a little off-topic to me in here.

[jannesiera]

Welcome .

[Harkins]

You do your best to avoid PHP... by using Perl? Weeeeird.

But welcome, nice to have you.

[dbest]

welcome to the forum

[JGadrow]

Welcome. Always nice to see someone using a different technology. The community would get stale, in my opinion, if we didn't get someone using something new every now and again.

[bbgames]

Oh wow, it's nice to see another Perl user - it seems like we're pretty rare these days (in fact, I've switched to Python).

I'm pretty sure I've met you on Dream.In.Code, your name seems familiar - at any rate, welcome to the forums!

[dsheroh]

You do your best to avoid PHP... by using Perl? Weeeeird.

Weird?  How so?  (And I'll leave it at that for now, since I don't seem to be able to say why it doesn't seem weird to me without slipping into Perl advocacy mode...  )

Oh wow, it's nice to see another Perl user - it seems like we're pretty rare these days (in fact, I've switched to Python).

You can check out the Perl Iron Man aggregator to find a lot of people trying to raise Perl's profile by blogging about it.  (Technically, I'm participating, but I never seem to be able to find anything worth blogging about, so I'm permanently stuck at "Paper Man" status.)  The Perl Renaissance is afoot!

My overall impression is that Perl is used pretty widely, it just seems like it isn't because a: most people are using Perl as a side thing, not a core responsibility (e.g., the archetypal sysadmin whipping up small bits of Perl to make his life a little easier) and b: the people seriously into Perl tend to spend their time writing Perl rather than writing about Perl, which is basically what Perl Iron Man is trying to change.

I'm pretty sure I've met you on Dream.In.Code, your name seems familiar - at any rate, welcome to the forums!

Yeah, you have.  I'm the guy in the Perl and Python forum who answers all the Perl questions.    Sometimes I worry that I might have scared off everyone else from touching them... or hope that the DIC Perlers have recognized that I know it all so well that there's no point in responding, since I'll just give a better answer anyhow.     I'm also occasionally active in the DIC Game Dev and Freelancing forums and submitted an Ars Magica dice roller in Python for this week's 52 Weeks of Code, so you may have spotted me in those contexts instead.  (Oh, and slight difference in username...  I included my full last name there, "dsherohman".)

[raestlyn]

Quick question: can perl be used for comet ( or just reverse ajax) better than php due phps restrictions?
 If so, I might start learning perl instead of java.
I must confess I know nothing about perl and how it is suitable on servers.

Sorry if that didn't made any sense, I'm drunk..

[dsheroh]

Quick question: can perl be used for comet ( or just reverse ajax) better than php due phps restrictions?
 If so, I might start learning perl instead of java.
I must confess I know nothing about perl and how it is suitable on servers.

Disclaimer:  I've never done anything with COMET myself, although I was already aware of it, and I don't know what "restrictions" in PHP you're referring to.

There's been a fair bit of talk about COMET in the Perl community over the last year and it's definitely on a lot of people's radar, including some of the big names.  The former maintainer of Catalyst, the most-widely-used Perl web framework, is currently working on a new lightweight web framework, Mojolicious, and one of his stated design goals is to incorporate all the latest web technologies, specifically including COMET.

As for what's out there already, a search on CPAN turned up Stardust, which describes itself as "the simplest COMET server I could imagine".  It's currently only at version 0.07 and the docs are incomplete, but the existing docs look good and it ships with a runnable demo which packs a minimal COMET server into about a dozen lines of code (if you ignore all the option-parsing and similar boilerplate code).

In the broader picture, PHP is much more similar to Perl than to Java, so that's likely to make Perl a bit easier for you to pick up if PHP is the only language you currently know.