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93% of Paint Splatters Are Valid Perl Programs

colinm.org

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Re: 93% of Paint Splatters Are Valid Perl Programs

#121

Post by godelski »

fourier_mode wrote: post #100
godelski wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The logic doesn't follow the other direction. It isn't a necessary condition. We're doing (93% paint splatter -> perl code) but that isn't equivalent to (93% perl code -> paint splatter). The first could be valid AND the following can be valid (0.1% perl code -> paint splatter)

Aren't 100% perl code -> paint splatters. For each code there exists a paint splatter i.e. image of the code itself.

I'm just saying the logic doesn't follow. Given the claim does not necessarily require the opposite to be true. I don't actually know much about this perl being paint splatter and why that even makes sense.

Your statement might make sense, but what I'm saying is that the claim in the title doesn't equate to the claim you made. That's all I'm saying.

Re: 93% of Paint Splatters Are Valid Perl Programs

#122

Post by tluyben2 »

freedomben wrote: post #11
cure wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah... Ruby's very nice and feels Perl-ish sometimes.

Yep, if you like Perl you've got to spend some time with Ruby. It shares a heritage. Many of the people I used to Perl with moved over and were (and are) very happy. That said many of the "perl-isms" in Ruby are looked down upon by the community, but you can still use them ;-)

I programmed Perl for many years and Ruby as well; I see the similarities but I very much prefer Perl and find idiomatic Ruby not very pleasant to read or write. Matter of taste ofcourse.

Re: 93% of Paint Splatters Are Valid Perl Programs

#123

Post by bradleyjg »

kbenson wrote: post #90
bradleyjg wrote: post #85

If you never worked in perl, you might think people are being a bit mean and want to take a contrarian position. It really was that bad. You'd come back from lunch and need to pull out a notepad and start diagramming to understand the code you are written an hour earlier. The only language I've ever seen, outside of joke languages like brainfuck, where the typical program was less readable is APL.

> You'd come back from lunch and need to pull out a notepad and start diagramming to understand the code you are written an hour earlier. I think this says more about your skill level in programming Perl or programming in general at that time than it does about Perl. Or at least the influences that you learned Perl from. It's possible to write nearly unreadable code in any language. It's easier to do so in Perl, sinc…

I was certainly not a good programmer back then. But when I started writing java (1.1!) instead my bad code was a lot less bad.

While I’m sure it’s possible to write maintainable perl I’ve never heard anyone say “we had 10,000 lines of perl and it was a joy to work with.” Ever.

Re: 93% of Paint Splatters Are Valid Perl Programs

#124

Post by pronoiac »

ozzmotik wrote: post #98

ah, a nice and absurd sigbovik presentation. everything I hear from that convention has been simultaneously silly and amazing (especially the stuff that Tom7 did like having a printed program with only printable characters that is a valid and compiling c program)

Um. He made an executable using only printable characters.

Re: 93% of Paint Splatters Are Valid Perl Programs

#125

Post by kbenson »

bradleyjg wrote: post #123
kbenson wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You'd come back from lunch and need to pull out a notepad and start diagramming to understand the code you are written an hour earlier. I think this says more about your skill level in programming Perl or programming in general at that time than it does about Perl. Or at least the influences that you learned Perl from. It's possible to write nearly unreadable code in any language. It's easier to do so in Perl, sinc…

I was certainly not a good programmer back then. But when I started writing java (1.1!) instead my bad code was a lot less bad. While I’m sure it’s possible to write maintainable perl I’ve never heard anyone say “we had 10,000 lines of perl and it was a joy to work with.” Ever.

The Java version puts the prior comment in perspective. I agree even most Perl programmers would not want to work on a codebase from this Era. The problem is that Perl was the de-facto web programming language at the time, and large swaths of the internet was written by Perl neophytes and programming amateurs. The code generated by this population was necessarily problematic.

By the same token, PHP codebase of the early 2000's were a horrible mess. There is a downside to being among the popular and accessible languages of a period. It takes a while for the general community skill level to increase and best practices to trickle down to new people. Javascript of a few years ago wasn't all that different, except for a large amount of experienced programmers from other languages also being involved because of its privileged place as the language of web browsers.

These days, I wouldn't imagine most codebasse of 10k lines in Perl being noticeably worse than in Python or Ruby.

Re: 93% of Paint Splatters Are Valid Perl Programs

#126

Post by earenndil »

bmn__ wrote: post #107
earenndil wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Perl6 wasn't _released_ until 2016, though.

You mean, 1.0 of the spec was released then. Don't pretend it wasn't perfectly possible to write and run useful Perl6 programs for a good ten years prior. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pugs_(programming) https://github.com/viklund/november/

For some definition of 'perl6'. I have a perl6 book from o'reilly from 2006, and I flipped through it recently. It bears almost no resemblance to modern perl6. There were a couple of things that were still the same (and not just vestiges from perl5 like sigils and function calls looking like function calls), but by and large it was something completely different.

Re: 93% of Paint Splatters Are Valid Perl Programs

#127

Post by collyw »

dalke wrote: post #106
ktpsns wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While some people tend to say Perl was chosen by the young bioinformatics community because of it's excel in text processing, I think Perl was just the go-to scripting language in the late 90s. In my field (numerical relativity), Perl was also the go-to language in the early days. People then moved on to Python because of the numpy/scipy ecosystem which allowed to combine Perl-like scripts with Matlab/Fortran like po…

Perl was being used in bioinformatics in the early 1990s - definitely before the "late 90s". Perl was becoming the go-to language in Unix fields in early 1990s, and bioinformatics comes out of that Unix tradition. (See also my comment at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11381917 .) There's no reason to guess which factors contributed to Perl's uptake in the young bioinformatics community. Text processing is only…

I switched to Python in 2011 (basically because Django was a lot easier to get into as web framework, better docs and because too many ways to do things made Catalyst confusing for a beginner).

Perl was starting to loose ground by then, but was still pretty popular. My guess is around a third of bioinformaticans were using it as the goto language at that point.

Its a pity, I miss Perl and still pull it out for quick scripts that involve manipulating the filesystem as its got so much better syntactic sugar for that sort of thing. And using regexes in Python is such a chore in comparison. I always need to look up the docs, whereas I remember how to use them in Perl despite hardly using the language in 8 years

Re: 93% of Paint Splatters Are Valid Perl Programs

#128

Post by collyw »

ndnxhs wrote: post #108
orev wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Perl gives you as much rope as you want to hang yourself. If you can develop a style, and try to avoid being too clever, it can be just as readable as any other language.

And then someone else tries to read your code. One of the things I love about ruby dev is its not about providing 10000 ways to do the same thing but about making sure that given a simple problem, every developer will solve it in pretty much the same way.

I have had to maintain absolute crap in Python and beautifully written Perl. 90% of it is down to the developer.

Re: 93% of Paint Splatters Are Valid Perl Programs

#129

Post by collyw »

AceJohnny2 wrote: post #44

Quite against my better judgment, I've made the transition from Perl-hater to Perl- er... -tolerator. I found myself arguing yesterday with another person in the team about the proper use of Perl references, which I cursed and spat on for 2 days when I first had to use them. I once read that my current position mirrors that of most Perl users. (my boss has a self-confessed "irrational" hatred of Python because of sem…

The whitespace thing annoyed me when I first stared using Python. Then after using Python for a few months I went back and modified some Perl. Moved some blocks of code around and lost a brace somewhere. Spent 20 minutes trying to work out where. Then I realized that it's is a problem that never occurs in Python.

Re: 93% of Paint Splatters Are Valid Perl Programs

#130

Post by collyw »

shstalwart wrote: post #120
AceJohnny2 wrote: post #44

Quite against my better judgment, I've made the transition from Perl-hater to Perl- er... -tolerator. I found myself arguing yesterday with another person in the team about the proper use of Perl references, which I cursed and spat on for 2 days when I first had to use them. I once read that my current position mirrors that of most Perl users. (my boss has a self-confessed "irrational" hatred of Python because of sem…

I kinda agree with you boss. I don't hate python, but I find semantic whitespace both tyrannical and error prone. Interestingly, Makefiles also have semantic whitespace, which seems to be much more commonly despised than python's.

What do you find error prone in it? As I just posted above, it solves the problem of loosing braces when moving code blocks around.
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