Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Perl 5.26.0 released

nntp.perl.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

131–140 of 165 posts

Re: Perl 5.26.0 released

#131

Post by yellowapple »

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…

"In a few years nobody will use perl5 anymore, everybody will use cperl instead."

That seems like an awfully bold claim.

cperl is great, don't get me wrong, but if I'm going to move away from Perl 5 to a different Perl I'd rather just move to Perl 6 (and, in fact, I already have for some of my latest pet projects; so far, I've been very impressed).

Re: Perl 5.26.0 released

#132

Post by yellowapple »

petre wrote: post #67
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.

We are using it in production. It gets the job done. Looking forward to a Perl6 stable release. It is stable but Rakudo still needs a bit of polush. Also it doesn't have the amount of modules Perl5 has. What it does have however, is precise arithmetic because numbers in Perl6 are internally represented as rationals. https://docs.perl6.org/type/Rat

Part of Perl 6's current problem is that it doesn't have a real CPAN equivalent yet. Hopefully that'll be fixed soon.

Re: Perl 5.26.0 released

#133

Post by i336_ »

duskwuff wrote: post #122
i336_ wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Oh. That's unfortunate. Thanks very much for the headsup.

I wouldn't mind learning more about this, perhaps via email (as an alternative to public discussion that might(?) start a flamewar).

Re: Perl 5.26.0 released

#134

Post by vram22 »

pyre wrote: post #103
btilly wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Meh. In Python you can put a def inside of any scope you want and do anything that you want with it. The fact that it winds up with a name in that scope doesn't stop it from being anonymous everywhere else. At that point the difference is just syntax.

You're declaring the function within that scope. You can do this in other languages too. In Javascript, I can declare a function within a scope too: function myFunc () { var myFunc2 = function () {}; return myFunc3().then(myFunc2); } This isn't some Python-specific thing. > At that point the difference is just syntax. Isn't that the case with most things? If I said that I missed curly braces, that's "just syntax" too…

>You're declaring the function within that scope. You can do this in other languages too.

>This isn't some Python-specific thing.

I think btilly meant that by the ability to do in Python what he described (define a nested function and then return it), you get (almost) all the same features as anonymous functions (and specifically, more than Python's lambdas give you, because they can only contain an expression, not statements) - in response to what you said:

>Python just has lambda functions which can only evaluate an expression.

In fact, IIRC, Guido (van Rossum, Python creator) has been known to say, to people who complain about the limitations of lambda in Python, to just use nested functions. And BTW they are quite powerful so you can do a lot with them.

He (btilly) was not implying that other languages cannot have nested function declarations (if I understood his comment right).

Re: Perl 5.26.0 released

#135

Post by vram22 »

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'. 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 you can see from the names - you can't tell what they are for.

I'm not a Perl expert, but have read books on it and done a bit with it. I think Perl tends to attract the kind of people who find these kinds of names (and many other things) fun, and are not put off by it - which is fine.

>worse examples

According to who(m)? Opinions differ.

Re: Perl 5.26.0 released

#136

Post by pyre »

vram22 wrote: post #134
pyre wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're declaring the function within that scope. You can do this in other languages too. In Javascript, I can declare a function within a scope too: function myFunc () { var myFunc2 = function () {}; return myFunc3().then(myFunc2); } This isn't some Python-specific thing. > At that point the difference is just syntax. Isn't that the case with most things? If I said that I missed curly braces, that's "just syntax" too…

>You're declaring the function within that scope. You can do this in other languages too. >This isn't some Python-specific thing. I think btilly meant that by the ability to do in Python what he described (define a nested function and then return it), you get (almost) all the same features as anonymous functions (and specifically, more than Python's lambdas give you, because they can only contain an expression, not s…

> And BTW they are quite powerful so you can do a lot with them.

I'm not saying that they aren't powerful. I'm saying that personally, I find declaring one-time-use functions in-line to be syntactically more pleasant / organized than sticking the function definition in the middle of functional code.

I'm not a newbie to Python, but after working with it for years, it's one of those things that I still wish existed. It's not necessarily a pain point or deal breaker or anything. I'm not even sure how it could work given Python's syntax.

Re: Perl 5.26.0 released

#137

Post by noir_lord »

baldfat wrote: post #42
randallsquared wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Shrugs, it pays the bills and has improved radically since 4 and even 5.

It wouldn't be my first choice but there is plenty of reasonable paying work around.

Re: Perl 5.26.0 released

#138

Post by rurban »

yellowapple wrote: post #131
rurban wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

"In a few years nobody will use perl5 anymore, everybody will use cperl instead." That seems like an awfully bold claim. cperl is great, don't get me wrong, but if I'm going to move away from Perl 5 to a different Perl I'd rather just move to Perl 6 (and, in fact, I already have for some of my latest pet projects; so far, I've been very impressed).

Perl 6 is a different language, no chance for a replacement. It's also much slower and unusable for professional usage.

cperl is a not a different perl, it's a perl5 replacement, which is faster, more secure, less bugs and more features. types and using a modern perl is optional. 90% of the vm and toolchain is unmaintained by p5p, and taken over by cperl.

Re: Perl 5.26.0 released

#139

Post by cutler »

petre wrote: post #126
dozzie wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

With TruffleRuby, Graal and Substrate VM all aimed at improving Ruby's speed I wouldn't write-off Ruby purely on performance. JRuby has also recently made great strides in performance.

Re: Perl 5.26.0 released

#140

Post by rurban »

petre wrote: post #128
rurban wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

p2 was too much work to come up with a backcompat p5 library with all its problems. And I saw no easy way to add multithreading. Forking perl5 was easier in the short run.

In the long run switching out to a fast VM for tight loops like p2, rperl or spvm (formerly called sperl) is still being considered. Perl6 inline::perl5 is unfortunately not doing too good, and I see no way forward with their architecture.

perl11 is doing very well. Many perl6 features are already in cperl, many more not yet completed. The design is done and sound.

Post reply on HN