Dwindling CPAN Releases • Hacker News Board

Re: Dwindling CPAN Releases

#91

Post by cat199 » Thu, Aug 01, 2019, 1:03 PM UTC

ojosilva wrote: post #83

I think Perl was fighting on too many fronts at the turn of the century: web, systems automation, data processing, science and a few more. Today these areas are better covered by other languages that have hefty internet buzz and corporate support behind. Perl also has no shiny features. It's just extremely dynamic and paradigm agnostic, great at shell interactions and natural at text processing (specially with regexe…

> web, systems automation, data processing, science and a few more.

doesn't this apply to python, although now there are additional competitors?

> reinvented itself as a web language (Mojolicious, Plack).

highly opinionated and potentially flame creating , but -

perl was the original web language in the CGI era, PHP pretty much dethroned it due to simplicity of server integration, rails knocked them both out of 'leading edge', then the Node/SPA era arrived.

mojolicious / plack are pretty much things to bring perl up to date w/r/t the 'rails' type

Re: Dwindling CPAN Releases

#92

Post by roryrjb » Thu, Aug 01, 2019, 1:08 PM UTC

nerdponx wrote: post #78

vultour wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The most obnoxious parameter passing in existence? The magic variables everywhere? Perl code is an unreadable heap of spaghetti, I’d much rather be figuring out unallocated memory bugs in C then read Perl.

Don't forget sigils. Because the difference between @foo and $foo is obvious, right?

Not to someone who doesn't know Perl. But this is the same for every language. No one should be picking up a new language and working with it if they don't know it.

EDIT: To clarify, I mean there should never be the expectation that you can start working in a language in earnest without properly learning it.

Re: Dwindling CPAN Releases

#93

Post by roryrjb » Thu, Aug 01, 2019, 1:12 PM UTC

vultour wrote: post #64

roryrjb wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Perl is a general purpose programming language. The Perl interpreter and language are stable, it's not going anywhere soon. Perl and its syntax have been around a lot longer than most other languages and is very similar to C, C++, JavaScript and PHP. What do you consider normal syntax?

The most obnoxious parameter passing in existence? The magic variables everywhere? Perl code is an unreadable heap of spaghetti, I’d much rather be figuring out unallocated memory bugs in C then read Perl.

But why obnoxious? Do you know how old Perl is? Have you written shell scripts before? My point is, some of choices Larry and others made wouldn't necessarily be made today, but there's a history, a lineage, a reason for all of this. I actually like the magic variables, but as I said in my other comment, you need to learn it first. X language is an unreadable heap of spaghetti if the programmer writes X language in an unreadable way.

Re: Dwindling CPAN Releases

#94

Post by Audiophile65 » Thu, Aug 01, 2019, 1:15 PM UTC

Nice post :)

Re: Dwindling CPAN Releases

#95

Post by roryrjb » Thu, Aug 01, 2019, 1:16 PM UTC

There's so much negativity in this thread. I think that a big part of Perl's decline is exactly because of people's attitudes. I don't actually write any Perl now, but to me it's a beautiful language, I always enjoy working in it. You can abuse it in the wrong way like every other language. If I was to suggest using it in the day job there would be uproar probably. But just because I like Perl doesn't mean I want to write everything in it, use the best tool for the job and sometimes the best tool is Perl.

Re: Dwindling CPAN Releases

#96

Post by mkl » Thu, Aug 01, 2019, 1:17 PM UTC

jsymolon wrote: post #85

isostatic wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which version of python? Perl documentation online applys to versions of perl that are installed. Python stuff is all bleeding edge - you'll research why something isn't working and after 30 minutes find it's expecting python 3.7. The whole concept of "virtualenv" gives me an impression of fragility I don't get with perl.

Wanted to use Python 3 for some processing but the Sysadmin said that only Python 2 was available for that distributions version and "didn't want to frankenstein the box"

What about installing miniconda in your home folder?

How ancient is that system?

Re: Dwindling CPAN Releases

#97

Post by gkfasdfasdf » Thu, Aug 01, 2019, 1:32 PM UTC

I still use perl for handy one liners on the command line. E.g. I had a 1 GB log file where I wanted to generate a histogram of the intervals between certain log messages. I used a perl one-liner to extract the timestamp via regex (regexs are perl's bread and butter), calculate the diff between the previous timestamp (easy because of auto string => double conversion), use the diff value as a key in a hash of counters (autovivification really handy here), then print the hash at the end with sorted keys using the Data::Dumper module. Took me all of 5 minutes to write. I don't write Perl often but I am thankful that it exists.

Re: Dwindling CPAN Releases

#98

Post by 0x445442 » Thu, Aug 01, 2019, 1:44 PM UTC

cygx wrote: post #69

peteretep wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which is ironic, because even the most ardent Perlies among us were wringing our hands about its inevitable decline well before then.

Choose a different metric, and the story will change significantly: https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&q=perl%20t... https://insights.stackoverflow.com/trends?tags=perl There are also anecdotes such as this: https://www.perlmonks.org/bare/?node_id=1225020 Perl6 was supposed to help with this. It has yet to do so.

Nice job. I think these graphs depict Perl's "sphere of influence" in IT with respect to time much better than the original article's depiction.

Re: Dwindling CPAN Releases

#99

Post by sigzero » Thu, Aug 01, 2019, 1:46 PM UTC

l33tman wrote: post #8

Long ago I used to joke that perl is write-only... was that harsh or realistic? (I still believe it - too clever constructions which feel smart at the time you come up with them :)

write-only is more on the programmer than the language.

Re: Dwindling CPAN Releases

#100

Post by cafard » Thu, Aug 01, 2019, 1:49 PM UTC

iamnotacrook wrote: post #7

I used Perl for a bit but switched to Python because I was finding it harder to work out what some code I'd written a year or so ago did than to write it again, a problem I don't have with Python.

I used Perl for many years, and still do. My bias is now toward Python for scripting, because the young all seem to know Python. But for example to write a script to be run on Linux that will talk to SQL Server, I will use Perl, since DBD:Sybase works, and I don't feel like fussing around to find and configure a Python equivalent.