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Perl 5.26.0 released

nntp.perl.org

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Re: Perl 5.26.0 released

#41

Post by ethelward »

snarfy wrote: post #38
klodolph wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

> Unicode regexes is a pretty small edge case

Except for any other language than english.

Re: Perl 5.26.0 released

#42

Post by baldfat »

randallsquared wrote: post #36
kluck wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. :)

Well, every time I meet someone and they say they use PHP for their living my inter monologue is "Don't be a jerk and don't bash PHP, its a fine choice." I usually have to make sure I don't talk with them long and move along. I am a jerk either way.

Re: Perl 5.26.0 released

#44

Post by joosters »

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 5 isn't a 'cool' language, because it isn't trying to rapidly change itself, instead it just works. I use it just about every day (by my own choice!) and it can be a fine language to develop in. The libraries available in CPAN contain support for pretty much any task you could think of.

Most of the horror stories that you'll hear about perl are from people who have tried to fix/maintain code that was written badly, which is no different from any other language. You can write horrific or easily-readable code in any language.

Perhaps perl has its reputation because it is often used as a quick kludge to do something that would be just too painful to do in shell script, and novice writers just cut & paste stuff from their searches online to get the job done?

Re: Perl 5.26.0 released

#45

Post by oblio »

TurboHaskal wrote: post #16
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.

There are still jobs specially on the banking sector, but these are not the kind of jobs you want. Its position in the industry is somewhat dying as I'm not aware of many new projects being written in it. I am myself in the process of phasing out a significant Perl codebase in exchange for Java. I think it cannot compete with Python at its current state. This has nothing to do with the language (I consider Perl to be…

> I think it cannot compete with Python at its current state. This has nothing to do with the language (I consider Perl to be vastly superior) but rather its ecosystem and lack of momentum.

In this specific case, these are contradictory.

Perl and Python had roughly the same amount of corporate backing (almost none) and Perl had a huge head start.

If Perl as a language would be "vastly superior", Python would have never developed its ecosystem and wouldn't have ever gathered enough momentum.

Re: Perl 5.26.0 released

#46

Post by wcummings »

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.

I interviewed for a Perl gig at a biotechnology company recently. There's still people using perl out there.

Re: Perl 5.26.0 released

#47

Post by tacostakohashi »

collyw wrote: post #23
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.

I moved from Perl to python around 6 years ago. There are more jobs available for Python, though probably more competition as well. I regularly see Perl jobs posted in London, but the wages are surprisingly poor, compared to what I could get for my Django knowledge.

I think your comment on wages is astute, and it's the same everywhere. There are Perl jobs around, but they're on legacy codebases in (parts of) organizations that are basically too dysfunctional / under-resourced / incompetent to upgrade them, and if you take the job you'll just be putting out fires and stagnating.

When you take that into account, the salary would need to be at a real premium to make it worthwhile, and the premium just isn't there.

Re: Perl 5.26.0 released

#48

Post by wcummings »

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.

Modern Perl pretty much has feature parity with python. Don't listen to the "perl bigots".

Re: Perl 5.26.0 released

#49

Post by rcthompson »

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 still the only language I've seen that has a dedicated syntax for regular expressions. Every other language requires you to write your regexes as strings, which puts you squarely in backslash hell.

(I'm sure there must be other languages with dedicated regex syntax, but I'm not aware of any.)

Re: Perl 5.26.0 released

#50

Post by mirchibajji »

twhb wrote: post #43
ibn-alfatal wrote: post #11

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

Is it really Perl best practice to assume all non-scalar data types are trusted?

Definitely not. At $work, we use Params::Validate as a standard way to normalise and validate the incoming parameters.
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