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Ask HN: Is Perl dead?

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Re: Ask HN: Is Perl dead?

#121

Post by philwelch »

chromatic wrote: post #118
philwelch wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd take your argument at all seriously if it were more honest, say either "I don't believe any implementation of Perl 6 will ever meet the 6.0.0 spec" or "It shouldn't have taken ten years to release Rakudo Star." Those are debatable positions. Actually, I clarified what I meant in a previous post, when I characterized Perl 6 implementations as "incomplete implementation[s] of a draft specification". I didn't say it…

... you try to cleverly evade the fact that every Perl 6 implementation is an incomplete implementation of a draft spec. Nonsense; even the release announcements say that directly. All I made was a statement of fact--Perl 6 isn't done yet. I wouldn't have objected if you'd written that. Characterizing software we've released on schedule for almost three years running as something thrown out in the world incomplete, a…

I think we got 2 posts in before I clarified that's what I meant by "pre-release", and here you are still objecting a day later.

Re: Ask HN: Is Perl dead?

#122

Post by kqueue »

hippich wrote: post #106
kqueue wrote: post #4

Learn Python and you'll notice why perl doesn't make sense.

python is like basic. basic on steroids, but still basic. perfect for people with 'straight' brain. just like you.

You obviously don't know much about Python... and very little about programming.

Re: Ask HN: Is Perl dead?

#123

Post by pragmatic »

rcfox wrote: post #59
jlees wrote: post #13

FYI, I use Perl extensively for text file parsing and processing Yeah, me too, but that's the issue. It's great at that. Great at quick and dirty command line hacks. Hell, most of my PhD code was written in Perl. (Something I take a perverse satisfaction in.) But it's not great for rapid webapp development, it's probably harder to hire people, there are fewer libraries and interfaces and open source toolkits, etc - s…

> there are fewer libraries and interfaces and open source toolkits, etc Um... What? According to http://search.cpan.org/ , there are 85193 community-contributed modules. Okay, some of that is stupid stuff ( http://search.cpan.org/perldoc?Acme::Meow ) but they don't make up a large percentage. Compare that to PyPI's 11199 packages and RubyGems' 15674 gems.

Yes, but do they _work_? That's why I became disillusioned with Perl, even though it was heavily used at my last company. I got the "oh, yeah, just go to CPAN and grab the module." I usually ended up using Java (how perverse is that?). I now prefer Python and C# because I find more stuff that works (but still plenty of broken old stuff).

Re: Ask HN: Is Perl dead?

#124

Post by Luyt »

phaylon wrote: post #83
wazoox wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Weird, considering that the very well-known free game Frozen Bubble is written in SDL/Perl...

It's now also on CPAN by the way at http://search.cpan.org/dist/Games-FrozenBubble/ I'm not really a game developer or have any idea about SDL, but from the Perl feeds I read (I think this instance was from Planet Iron Man) I gather that the SDL development was recently revitalized. They have their website at http://sdl.perl.org/ and since the Latest News entry at this time is from the end of August, it seems up-to-d…

YouTube is full of Frozen Bubble movies. See for example http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5nUkly7AkFs , someone completing level 70.

Re: Ask HN: Is Perl dead?

#125

Post by prodigal_erik »

berntb wrote: post #70
prodigal_erik wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How much of CPAN has been migrated to Moose, as opposed to directly calling "bless" as the docs[1] advocate even now? As I understand it, the story on interop between the two styles is "don't go there". [1] http://perldoc.perl.org/perlobj.html

The perlobj perldoc is about the old style OO -- and discusses the old style OO... :-) It doesn't discuss any CPAN modules at all (there are quite a lot about OO). Are you trolling? What problems do you mean with Moose and the blessed OO?

Not at all. I learned Perl from the manpages, and I'm mystified how noobs are to discover and convince themselves that "man perlobj" is now bad advice yet remains official.

As for bless/Moose interop, I read somewhere there were big problems mixing the two but don't remember the specifics (I mostly dropped Perl a long time ago over its dogged attempts to guess what I probably wanted when I made a mistake). Others in this thread now say that's not true if it ever was, which is good news for users of pre-Moose CPAN modules.

Re: Ask HN: Is Perl dead?

#126

Post by berntb »

prodigal_erik wrote: post #125
berntb wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The perlobj perldoc is about the old style OO -- and discusses the old style OO... :-) It doesn't discuss any CPAN modules at all (there are quite a lot about OO). Are you trolling? What problems do you mean with Moose and the blessed OO?

Not at all. I learned Perl from the manpages, and I'm mystified how noobs are to discover and convince themselves that "man perlobj" is now bad advice yet remains official. As for bless/Moose interop, I read somewhere there were big problems mixing the two but don't remember the specifics (I mostly dropped Perl a long time ago over its dogged attempts to guess what I probably wanted when I made a mistake). Others in…

>>I learned Perl from the manpages

Well, that was impressive. Stupid, but impressive... :-)

>>discover and convince themselves that "man perlobj" is now bad advice yet remains official.

AGAIN: Those man pages doesn't discuss CPAN modules. But afaik, they recommend books and the web...

Re: Ask HN: Is Perl dead?

#127

Post by chromatic »

prodigal_erik wrote: post #125
berntb wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The perlobj perldoc is about the old style OO -- and discusses the old style OO... :-) It doesn't discuss any CPAN modules at all (there are quite a lot about OO). Are you trolling? What problems do you mean with Moose and the blessed OO?

Not at all. I learned Perl from the manpages, and I'm mystified how noobs are to discover and convince themselves that "man perlobj" is now bad advice yet remains official. As for bless/Moose interop, I read somewhere there were big problems mixing the two but don't remember the specifics (I mostly dropped Perl a long time ago over its dogged attempts to guess what I probably wanted when I made a mistake). Others in…

I'm mystified how noobs are to discover and convince themselves that "man perlobj" is now bad advice yet remains official.

Me too, which is one reason I'd like to remove it, or at least fix it.

Re: Ask HN: Is Perl dead?

#128

Post by kentnl »

chromatic wrote: post #102
pchristensen wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Look like Rails took a big bite out of Perl jobs?

In 2008? I can think of other explanations for a drop in hiring around then.

Hey, wasn't that the year the economy started to go south? .... Obviously, people stopped employing people in Perl, and the economy took a steep dive because of it!. Use Perl! Save the economy!.

( nb. for people with no sense of humour, this was a stab at people who don't understand that correlation != causation )

Re: Ask HN: Is Perl dead?

#129

Post by lelele »

rcfox wrote: post #104
lelele wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sorry. I should have deleted Python, Ruby - and maybe PHP for close to the metal web programming - after having copied the line. Regarding C/C++/Java, I was expecting HNers to prefer more agile languages and/or exploiting some other language's features to gain a competitive advantage.

PHP isn't low-level; it just makes you do everything yourself.

I thought it was low-level because I've read its frameworks tend to be faster (CodeIgniter comes to mind).

Re: Ask HN: Is Perl dead?

#130

Post by perigrin »

pragmatic wrote: post #123
rcfox wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> there are fewer libraries and interfaces and open source toolkits, etc Um... What? According to http://search.cpan.org/ , there are 85193 community-contributed modules. Okay, some of that is stupid stuff ( http://search.cpan.org/perldoc?Acme::Meow ) but they don't make up a large percentage. Compare that to PyPI's 11199 packages and RubyGems' 15674 gems.

Yes, but do they _work_? That's why I became disillusioned with Perl, even though it was heavily used at my last company. I got the "oh, yeah, just go to CPAN and grab the module." I usually ended up using Java (how perverse is that?). I now prefer Python and C# because I find more stuff that works (but still plenty of broken old stuff).

The CPAN ecosystem provides some basic guarantees that I haven't seen mentioned for other language's repositories. For example every distribution uploaded to the CPAN is tested on some subset of (using last month's statistics[1]) 15 different operating systems, across 81 platforms, and 26 different versions of Perl. Not every package is tested on every perl and every platform because this is a volunteer effort, but the major platforms (Linux, Windows, BSD, Solaris) are generally covered. These test results are aggregated and reported on search.cpan.org.

Every package uploaded is given a Bug Queue (rt.cpan.org) so bugs and patches can be reported to the author. Additionally distributions can now specify in their metadata (META.yaml/META.json) the source code repository for the code so you can see from search.cpan.org the place to get the latest code to patch against. Additionally there is a process that if a maintainer goes rogue and stops responding, packages can be taken over. This doesn't happen often but has been used when other options fail. Many modern projects have several co-maintainers who can all make releases lowering the "bus factor".

Right now the biggest problem is finding the wheat for all the chaff. Sturgeon's Law applies, 90% of everything is crap. With 21038 (as of this writing) unique distributions, finding the ones that are well written, useful, and generally "best" is actually a difficult problem. You're not alone in finding that hard, but there are projects like Task::Kensho[2] to curate CPAN. This process is hard and would require a full time team of experts to perform properly.

It is big problem but one I think I'd rather have than when I was (for example) working in Java in 2005 and not only had to go through the effort of assessing the module in question (will this work? is it good? will I have problems later) but also had to hunt around the web for where all the different projects were located.

[1]: http://stats.cpantesters.org/

[2]: Full disclosure, Task::Kensho is a project I started in 2007 based upon the feedback of several people in the Perl community.

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