Why Perl?

[mrbrahman]

Hi Phil,

Just wanted to know why you choose Perl to write Exiftool? Don't get me wrong, I love Perl -- just wanted to know your reasons.

Thanks!

[Phil Harvey]

I wanted to use a language that would minimize the amount of work I had to do to provide the features I planned for ExifTool (including cross-platform support).

C++ was out because supporting compiler compatibility issues across platforms would waste far to much of my time, but I would have chosen this language if my goal was to make money by licensing ExifTool.

Python was an obvious choice, but after writing some test code I decided that I didn't like the syntax of the language.

Perl was flexible, and very mature, so compiler issues would be minimal.  It was a good choice except for one thing: The handling of special characters:  Perl's support of UTF-8 isn't very good, and ActivePerl on Windows doesn't support special characters in file names.  I saw the fact that Perl isn't a very popular language as a good thing -- if ExifTool was too popular then I would spend too much time supporting users instead of developing the software.

- Phil