On Sun, 1 Mar 2015, T.J. Duchene wrote:

> On Sun, 2015-03-01 at 21:12 +0100, Philip Lacroix wrote:
>
>> As other members have already pointed out, this is not a fair
>> comparison.
>
> Perhaps. The reasons I made the comparison are:
>
> a) All of them have a dependency chain so interwoven and complex that
> they become non-trivial to remove. You literally cannot have a
> Debian/Devuan system without things like Perl or Python installed.

The perl-base package pre-depends on libc6 and dpkg. And nothing else.

The python2.7-minimal package depends on libpython2.7-minimal and zlib1g
and pre-depends on libc6. The libpython2.7-minimal package has no depends
or pre-depends.

This does not look "interwoven and complex" to me. You need a C library,
you need dpkg, and you need zlib, all of which are perfectly reasonable
things to expect from a bare-bones Linux system.

> b) The software written in either language have complex module
> dependency chains. Install something like MailScanner, and you will
> install a dozen Perl modules as well as a requirement.

You can write programs in Perl or Python that do not depend on any modules
that are not installed in the base Perl and Python packages.

> c) In both languages, modules are usually something of a "black art" and
> notorious for being unreliable at unexpected times.

Are you claiming that perl's module system does not always work as
expected? Or just that some perl modules are poorly-written?

> In my experience, while you can generally expect things like the Perl
> core language to act reliably,you can't expect the same of the rest of
> the Perl ecosystem to do the same. The QA simply is not there. Not to
> mention that all of this can massively impact performance.

This reads like FUD to me. Yes, it's possible to write Perl modules.
Like anything else, it's possible to do slipshod work. Why are you trying
to paint this as a *bad* thing?