Programming

I am new to this unix forum. I know java program and developed a open source software in java also. I have heard about perl. Someone said perl is faster than Java. Shall i develop my software in perl or java? Give me suggestion. Also, i like to know which is best.

There's a whole lot more to a language than 'faster' or 'slower'. How well it works for you depends quite a bit on what you do with it. There'd be tasks that'd be slow in Perl and fast in Java and vice versa; and more importantly, there'd also be things which are very simple in Perl and very difficult in Java and vice versa; that's the main reason people use any programming language -- convenience.

Perl is a versatile language that started as a string-processing language, but is extensible with modules that make it useful for just about anything; people have written games, data miners, and more in it. It's also relatively easy to get these modules, as it comes with CPAN, a program which can download and install Perl modules from a central repository for you. It supports object-oriented programming and complex data structures, albeit in an unconventional way. But string processing remains its greatest strength.

So if you have to load a thousand records from a database, do some complicated data processing on it and put them somewhere else, Perl would be a good language for that. Being built for it, it might even beat Java's speed. If you want to write a graphic editing program, Java might be better suited to that; Perl may be capable of it using modules, but its CPU and memory use wouldn't be the most efficient.