[Genady]

I'm a SysAdmin and use PERL on an almost daily basis, I've done some really advanced things in PERL, from writing modules to coming within a hair of writing PERL Objects and procedural exception handlers. My question is this: Is Cocoa for me? Most of the things that I want to do/create on OS X are networking related, an app to automate ARIN lookups, an IMAP client with built in Address Book, Calendar (yes Entorage/Evolution I can't afford Entorage I have found the Omni frameworks, but it all seems terribly clunky to me, I'm spoiled on all the PERL modules available out there.

Add to this the fact that all of this eyecandy is a bit new and strange to me, it's been 10 years since I dabbled in Delphi, (1.0!).

Can't someone just write a PERL module to Cocoa? Like Tk for Unix?

[sadie]

Last I heard, Apple did have a working Perl-Cocoa bridge, where NSObjects just showed up as if they were Perl objects. But they haven't gotten round to releasing it or acknowledging its existence to the outside world yet.

Maybe they will in 10.2 ... Maybe they won't ... And maybe us talking about it and pestering them will make the difference.

[larkost]

As both a Perl Monger and a WebObjects/Cocoa Developer I can say that they are different environments, each with their own strengths. I wish that Apple would get a RegularExpression module built strait into the NS environment like it is in Perl, but I wish that Perl's object orientation was even half of that either in Java or Obj-C.

If you are building regular apps, then Cocoa (I generally use Java) rocks, and Perl is no-where in sight (especially in the GUI and threading departments). If you are building CGI's without the WebObjects frameworks (or without a datatbase) then Perl wins. Perl also wins when it comes to writing run-once report generators.

Short Answer: Both Perl and Cocoa have their areas, and it depends on what you are doing. I can see the idea of having a Perl bridge being nice, but there are so many places where I can see it being a nasty mess (trying to figure out where to map scalar verses list context, etc...).