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Perl 5.26.0 released

nntp.perl.org

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Re: Perl 5.26.0 released

#31

Post by pwr22 »

rglullis wrote: post #6
0xFFC wrote: post #3

Guys I am genuinely asking this and I have zero intent on bashing on Perl. What is the position of Perl industry right now? how much it can compete with Python. Where does it compete? is it on losing side ? P.S. I am student and I have no real perspective on what is going on in industry right now.

The only big company I know that uses Perl extensively is booking.com, and I think that has more to do with any technical merit from the language, and just that is what they started and it was working for them. To be honest, I think Perl still powers a whole lot of systems, and certainly is a powerful tool for someone who is a Unix sysadmin, but this kind of job is dying. And as a language, I think Perl has nothing o…

I saw a talk at FOSDEM where a developer who worked at Booking said something along the lines of

- Big company bought lots of different hotel sites

- Big company decided to consolidate them into one system

- Booking (the Perl shop) won out

So I don't think it's necessarily just that "it started in Perl", if so then it could easily have been consolidated based on one of the other platforms that were not Perl based

Re: Perl 5.26.0 released

#32

Post by forinti »

stevekemp wrote: post #12
0xFFC wrote: post #3

Guys I am genuinely asking this and I have zero intent on bashing on Perl. What is the position of Perl industry right now? how much it can compete with Python. Where does it compete? is it on losing side ? P.S. I am student and I have no real perspective on what is going on in industry right now.

Even now I start web-projects with Perl. It's not "cool", it's not "sexy", but there package collection ( http://cpan.org/ ) is __huge__. I find it unlikely that new people will suddenly rediscover perl, in the golang/node.js/python-centric state the world is in. But the people who love it, do continue to love it, and do continue to do useful and essential things with it.

CPAN has never failed me. I love it.

Re: Perl 5.26.0 released

#33

Post by sethammons »

sverhagen wrote: post #4
tete wrote: post #2

Wow, I haven't looked at Perl in a while, but all sorts of numbers mentioned in the announcement really surprise me. Btw., as mentioned in announcement. The actual changes are here, if you missed that: https://metacpan.org/pod/release/XSAWYERX/perl-5.26.0/pod/pe...

Yes, impressive community effort for a language that... Well... I have heard nothing good about in any "at the water cooler" conversation that I was ever in, over the past fifteen years or so. Except, of course, that Perl is awesome at regular expressions, an advantage that most languages must have caught up on, no? Not for nothing Perl shows up in most hated-lists all around town (top 10 at Stack Overflow).

Perl's regex matching is faster than Go's, last I checked. At my work, we have a few large perl (and python) legacy codebases that are processing billions of messages a day. We are replacing them with far more performant Go. It is great to work with a senior Perl guy who can slam out solutions way faster than I can in any other language. However, for us, concurrency (and readability) is important. I like perl's AnyEvent better than python's Twisted, and python's Gevent better than both of those (in general). But these are nowhere near as awesome as Go's native concurrency primatives.

Re: Perl 5.26.0 released

#34

Post by thinkMOAR »

dagw wrote: post #27
thinkMOAR wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why do you think unix sysadmin function is dying? Just curious.

As an ex-sysadmin I find that a lot of what I used to be responsible for is now outsourced to "the cloud" and most of my old tasks are being handled by other people as a secondary responsibility. Back when I started it wasn't uncommon for a 20-50 man company to have a dedicated sysadmin, whereas now I hardly ever see that.

I see this too, and i think it is a shame/mistake, i'd recommend to keep such people on board, and expand their workload/responsibilities when sysadmin work is on the low. (though when needed they should be able to dedicated their full time on sysadmin related work).

I then see it happen they no longer have any knowledge about systems and their processes, just outsourcing. And often, things then go downhill quite fast in service which leads to less happy customers which leads to lower company/employee moral etc.

People not knowing what computing power certain processes need or what its worth in money (over/under specced nodes), or backup processes not properly monitored or setup.

Re: Perl 5.26.0 released

#35

Post by monk_e_boy »

0xFFC wrote: post #3

Guys I am genuinely asking this and I have zero intent on bashing on Perl. What is the position of Perl industry right now? how much it can compete with Python. Where does it compete? is it on losing side ? P.S. I am student and I have no real perspective on what is going on in industry right now.

Local companies using Perl have all migrated to Python or are 90% on the way. I know a few Perl guys who are employed just to keep legacy systems working while the customers are migrated over to the new Python systems.

Re: Perl 5.26.0 released

#36

Post by randallsquared »

kluck wrote: post #14
ibn-alfatal wrote: post #11

Perl always reminds me of this guy :) https://media.ccc.de/v/32c3-7130-the_perl_jam_2

I watched the video some time ago and what bothers me is that the author pretends to have hacked Perl while in fact he just found that some people are using a commonly used Perl module (DBI) the wrong way whereas the right way is well documented. A similar thing would be to blame PHP for allowing SQL injections through unescaped user input: I am sure it happens a lot, but who would blame PHP.

Until recently, blaming PHP was the popular approach. :)

Re: Perl 5.26.0 released

#37

Post by topkeker »

rurban wrote: post #29
falsedan wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reini, aren't you the sole dev working on cperl, the fork you set up because you disagreed with some of the patchs perl-porters accepted/rejected?

A single +1 developer is better than -5 developers. cperl got 10x more done in 2 years than p5p in 15 years, and the 10x factor is ongoing. In a few years nobody will use perl5 anymore, everybody will use cperl instead. I didn't only disagree with some patches, I disagree with most of the feature decisions, management and bugfix handling. And esp. with their negative track record. perl5 deserves a properly managed pr…

Reini, more importantly, do you like memes?

Re: Perl 5.26.0 released

#38

Post by snarfy »

klodolph wrote: post #7
sverhagen wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, impressive community effort for a language that... Well... I have heard nothing good about in any "at the water cooler" conversation that I was ever in, over the past fifteen years or so. Except, of course, that Perl is awesome at regular expressions, an advantage that most languages must have caught up on, no? Not for nothing Perl shows up in most hated-lists all around town (top 10 at Stack Overflow).

Perl is still awesome at regular expressions compared to other languages. It has better Unicode regex support than almost any other language. If you need to do intricate Unicode regexes, then your main choices are Perl and libraries for other languages which port Perl features, not always well-supported.

Unicode regexes is a pretty small edge case. Is it because Perl is awesome, or because Unicode sucks?

Re: Perl 5.26.0 released

#39

Post by baldfat »

sverhagen wrote: post #4
tete wrote: post #2

Wow, I haven't looked at Perl in a while, but all sorts of numbers mentioned in the announcement really surprise me. Btw., as mentioned in announcement. The actual changes are here, if you missed that: https://metacpan.org/pod/release/XSAWYERX/perl-5.26.0/pod/pe...

Yes, impressive community effort for a language that... Well... I have heard nothing good about in any "at the water cooler" conversation that I was ever in, over the past fifteen years or so. Except, of course, that Perl is awesome at regular expressions, an advantage that most languages must have caught up on, no? Not for nothing Perl shows up in most hated-lists all around town (top 10 at Stack Overflow).

> Perl is awesome at regular expressions

I don't know why Perl 1 to Perl 4 had messed up Regular Expression. Perl 5 actually redeemed themselves and returned to the normal good old regular expressions.

> Regexes in Perl are not he same as in Python, Ruby, or PHP, even if some of them call them "Perl 5 compatible Regular Expressions". https://perlmaven.com/introduction-to-regexes-in-perl

I would say the older Perl messed with RegEx and I wish everyone else would get on board. I HATED!!!!! doing my awk regex and then jumping into Perl it wouldn't work.

Re: Perl 5.26.0 released

#40

Post by ibn-alfatal »

kluck wrote: post #14
ibn-alfatal wrote: post #11

Perl always reminds me of this guy :) https://media.ccc.de/v/32c3-7130-the_perl_jam_2

I watched the video some time ago and what bothers me is that the author pretends to have hacked Perl while in fact he just found that some people are using a commonly used Perl module (DBI) the wrong way whereas the right way is well documented. A similar thing would be to blame PHP for allowing SQL injections through unescaped user input: I am sure it happens a lot, but who would blame PHP.

Actually, he breaks examples from the manual. I think his point was that programmers inherently write exploitable Perl code as they assume certain types are secure.
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