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Interview with Larry Wall

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Re: Interview with Larry Wall

#3

Post by yeowMeng »

My experience with Perl:

We (a corporate shop) have a lot 'legacy' scripts in Perl.

I am assigned to maintain such scripts as no one else wants that role.

I discover, Perl is powerful.

Every 'legacy' script I find can be trivially regression tested (These scripts always have the same pattern, take some input, produce some output).

Managers want to move away from Perl.

I want to move closer to Perl.

Re: Interview with Larry Wall

#6

Post by a3n » 

  > my @values = [1 .. 20];
  1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20
  > say @values[0,2,4 ... *];
  1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20
Wall says this should print all the evens, but it prints all (this is in the perl6 repl).

Re: Interview with Larry Wall

#7

Post by protomyth »

yeowMeng wrote: post #3

My experience with Perl: We (a corporate shop) have a lot 'legacy' scripts in Perl. I am assigned to maintain such scripts as no one else wants that role. I discover, Perl is powerful. Every 'legacy' script I find can be trivially regression tested (These scripts always have the same pattern, take some input, produce some output). Managers want to move away from Perl. I want to move closer to Perl.

The sad thing is about 90% of normal back-end computing at enterprises is take data source A,B,C,etc and generate data file Z. Cobol lives because it could do that well. Perl did that amazingly well[1]. Its really trivial to write easy to maintain code that does that in a very standard (across programs) way.

1) Data Munging with Perl was a pretty good book for it

Re: Interview with Larry Wall

#8

Post by digi_owl »

yeowMeng wrote: post #3

My experience with Perl: We (a corporate shop) have a lot 'legacy' scripts in Perl. I am assigned to maintain such scripts as no one else wants that role. I discover, Perl is powerful. Every 'legacy' script I find can be trivially regression tested (These scripts always have the same pattern, take some input, produce some output). Managers want to move away from Perl. I want to move closer to Perl.

Yep, powerful enough to power an online payment system.

http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2009/06/how_i_go...

Re: Interview with Larry Wall

#9

Post by ianai »

yeowMeng wrote: post #3

My experience with Perl: We (a corporate shop) have a lot 'legacy' scripts in Perl. I am assigned to maintain such scripts as no one else wants that role. I discover, Perl is powerful. Every 'legacy' script I find can be trivially regression tested (These scripts always have the same pattern, take some input, produce some output). Managers want to move away from Perl. I want to move closer to Perl.

Do they even have a replacement in mind already?

Re: Interview with Larry Wall

#10

Post by digi_owl »

protomyth wrote: post #7
yeowMeng wrote: post #3

My experience with Perl: We (a corporate shop) have a lot 'legacy' scripts in Perl. I am assigned to maintain such scripts as no one else wants that role. I discover, Perl is powerful. Every 'legacy' script I find can be trivially regression tested (These scripts always have the same pattern, take some input, produce some output). Managers want to move away from Perl. I want to move closer to Perl.

The sad thing is about 90% of normal back-end computing at enterprises is take data source A,B,C,etc and generate data file Z. Cobol lives because it could do that well. Perl did that amazingly well[1]. Its really trivial to write easy to maintain code that does that in a very standard (across programs) way. 1) Data Munging with Perl was a pretty good book for it

Work is receive input, mangle input, send output once you generalize it enough. but the devil will definitely be in the details.
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