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Perl 5.26.0 released

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Re: Perl 5.26.0 released

#121

Post by chromatic »

nf05papsjfVbc wrote: post #96
joosters wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 bad…

I think perl invites a kind of mindset from how the language is and how the initial community was. Why does it have something called 'say' instead of something more intuitive like 'println'. Then there are worse examples: carp, cluck, croak. These are commonly used. They are from the same module of course. There is also Moo, Moose. I'm not sure but was there something called 'Mo' too? Commonly used of course but as y…

Why does it have something called 'say' instead of something more intuitive like 'println'.

Why is the Unix command `ls` not `list-directory-contents`? Sure, it's a lot more for everyone to type all the time, but you could get rid of a single line in the man page, meaning the name is much, much more intuitive!

Re: Perl 5.26.0 released

#122

Post by duskwuff »

i336_ wrote: post #82
rurban wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

on the contrary perl5 has been relentlessly de-optimized and destroyed over the last ~15 years by its maintainers. how did you get to this interesting opinion? do you really believe the p5p marketing hype? perl5.6.2 still blows away all newer releases performance and memory usage wise. 15 years ago the author was still active.

It's sad you're being downvoted. I've found similar sentiment elsewhere, and I'm interested to learn more. stableperl ( http://blog.schmorp.de/2015-06-06-a-stable-perl.html ) is a fork of perl 5.22 with a couple of tiny reversions that re-enable access to some internal state required by certain CPAN modules. The author talks in other blog posts ( http://blog.schmorp.de/2016-12-29-griefing-the-perl-api.html , http://b…

Mark Lehmann and rurban are considered... let's just say, a vocal minority in the Perl community. Their opinions are not widely shared.

Re: Perl 5.26.0 released

#123

Post by [deleted] »

C0d3r wrote: post #5
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.

Companies who are already using a technology such as Perl usually already have both some senior people who only know that technology and/or have a big codebase on that, such that migrating the code would take considerable resources. Basically, sometimes it's not a choice.

[deleted]

Re: Perl 5.26.0 released

#124

Post by [deleted] »

C0d3r wrote: post #5
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.

Companies who are already using a technology such as Perl usually already have both some senior people who only know that technology and/or have a big codebase on that, such that migrating the code would take considerable resources. Basically, sometimes it's not a choice.

[deleted]

Re: Perl 5.26.0 released

#125

Post by floatboth »

ibn-alfatal wrote: post #40
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.

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.

The types point is actually meh. The real hilarious part is the combination of the ARGV "feature" and the open("...|") "feature". What. The. Fuck.

Re: Perl 5.26.0 released

#126

Post by petre »

dozzie wrote: post #98
cutler wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Python's growth in popularity is largely due to its superior data science libraries and the backing of Google. Without these it wouldn't be where it is today. Perl's stewardship is largley responsible for its decline. If Perl6 hadn't taken 15 years to complete Perl's popularity might be different. Perl6 is far superior to Python and most popular languages. It's just not performant at string/regex handling which is ir…

> Python's growth in popularity is largely due to its superior data science libraries and the backing of Google. Both are false. Data science libraries are quite new development that happened because Python got popular, not the other way around. Backing by Google (whatever you mean) was irrelevant, as the main selling points for Python dozen years ago was simple and readable syntax and nice web toolkits (a movement t…

For me it's quite the opposite: knowing Perl I have little incentive to learn Python; the syntax is quite different, it uses significant whitespace that can easily change the logic. With Ruby it's different because Matz was inspired by Perl and the language is quite ellegant. Too bad it's equally slow. Maybe if mruby/crystal changes that it would be a nice language to learn.

Re: Perl 5.26.0 released

#127

Post by petre »

tete wrote: post #69
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 am also not a Perl programmer (anymore). I used to program in Perl decades ago and mostly switched essentially because of the hype. I've now many years of professional experience with Python and while I really like the language and will continue to use it I have to say that Perl gets too much bashing and Python sometimes not enough. I think there are a number of reasons for this. One is that a lot more Perl code go…

> The main thing that I disliked about Perl is something I also dislike about C, which is writing arrows

You're in luck. Perl6 dropped the arrows. It's using dots just like everyone else. It also dropped the floating point math, so you can now do precise calculations natively which is a big deal for financial and scientific software.

I can second Mojolicious being one of the best web frameworks. We are using it for our web infrastructure. Basically we did a full rewrite from CGI.pm to Mojolicious. It is however Sinatra inspired, so let's give credit where credit is due.

Re: Perl 5.26.0 released

#128

Post by petre »

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…

Rieni, what happened to perl11 and p2 on potion? It looked like a very interesting project.

Re: Perl 5.26.0 released

#129

Post by yellowapple »

nf05papsjfVbc wrote: post #96
joosters wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 bad…

I think perl invites a kind of mindset from how the language is and how the initial community was. Why does it have something called 'say' instead of something more intuitive like 'println'. Then there are worse examples: carp, cluck, croak. These are commonly used. They are from the same module of course. There is also Moo, Moose. I'm not sure but was there something called 'Mo' too? Commonly used of course but as y…

"Why does it have something called 'say' instead of something more intuitive like 'println'."

'say' is a lot more intuitive than 'println' for me. In the former case, I'm telling my program to say something. In the latter case, I'm telling it to... print? What if I don't have a printer? And what's a 'ln'? Line? Loan? Loon?

In other words, 'println' is not "intuitive". The word you're looking for is "conventional" or "familiar", and it's only either or both of those things if the programmer is coming from a different language.

Perl was the first programming language that really "clicked" for me, though, so I'm probably a bit biased there.

(as a side note, Perl has a 'print' as well, which actually predates 'say' by a considerable amount ('say' only became a thing in, what, Perl 5.10?). 'say' is pretty much just 'sub say { print "$_[0]\n"; }'.)

"Then there are worse examples: carp, cluck, croak."

'carp' and 'cluck' are weird, yeah. 'croak', however, makes sense in the context of 'die'.

"There is also Moo, Moose."

Both of which feature the letters "oo", which usually stands for "object-oriented". Not as obvious as I'd personally like, but once you spot that it becomes clear that both have at least something to do with Perl5's object system.

Re: Perl 5.26.0 released

#130

Post by dragonwriter »

nf05papsjfVbc wrote: post #96
joosters wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 bad…

I think perl invites a kind of mindset from how the language is and how the initial community was. Why does it have something called 'say' instead of something more intuitive like 'println'. Then there are worse examples: carp, cluck, croak. These are commonly used. They are from the same module of course. There is also Moo, Moose. I'm not sure but was there something called 'Mo' too? Commonly used of course but as y…

> Why does it have something called 'say' instead of something more intuitive like 'println'.

"Say" is a common English verb that fairly directly communicates the action performed (with a bit of metaphor, sure.)

"Println" is, well it starts out with something which might be as good as "say" and then has some extra opaque consonants glued on the end.

The latter is only "more intuitive" from the perspective of someone whose used languages which happen to use it in the past.

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