Dwindling CPAN Releases • Hacker News Board

Re: Dwindling CPAN Releases

#101

Post by MichaelMoser123 » Thu, Aug 01, 2019, 1:50 PM UTC

eruci wrote: post #89

There is more than one way to look at it. I've been coding in Perl for 20 years, I'm a CPAN author [1] and I just published my third CPAN contribution yesterday. I've written over half a million Perl lines of currently in use enterprise cloud software[2] and I'll keep coding in Perl because I don't like the big snake dictatorship of "There should be one — and preferably only one — obvious way to do it." [1] https://m…

"There should be one — and preferably only one — obvious way to do it."

That is a python design principle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zen_of_Python

Now there are multiple (sometimes very confusing) ways to import stuff in python, so I am not quite sure if this principle is being followed.

https://realpython.com/absolute-vs-relative-python-imports/

Re: Dwindling CPAN Releases

#102

Post by badsectoracula » Thu, Aug 01, 2019, 1:55 PM UTC

nkozyra wrote: post #61

Perl is the language I once understood when I used it everyday but now look at with utter confusion. It's definitely not a casual language. As a comparison, I peeked at some Delphi/pascal code I'd written and a book a few weeks back and it was still parseable by my brain years later.

I've been writing Pascal and Delphi for more than 25+ years and C and C++ for around 20 years and a bunch of other languages for at least a decade, yet even with the tons of additions that Free Pascal has added over the years i always find Pascal code way more readable than C or (especially) C++ code. It helps that the Free Pascal developers try to keep the syntax for new stuff "Pascal-ish".

Re: Dwindling CPAN Releases

#103

Post by toast0 » Thu, Aug 01, 2019, 1:56 PM UTC

unmole wrote: post #37

isostatic wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I used python for a bit but switched to Perl because it 1) Works 2) Is ubiquitous 3) Is stable 4) Is normal (semicolons, braces etc)

> 2) Is ubiquitous On which systems do you have Perl readily available but not Python?

FreeBSD ships perl5 in base, but python is an addon. I suspect other BSDs may be similar. The only thing more ubiquitous is POSIX compatible /bin/sh but that's much less featureful.

Because of the stability of perl5, I barely care what version of perl5 that ends up being. (Perl 5.10 and up is pretty much what I want, 5.8 and 5.6 are a drag if i might need unicode)

Re: Dwindling CPAN Releases

#104

Post by tootie » Thu, Aug 01, 2019, 1:59 PM UTC

nkozyra wrote: post #61

Perl is the language I once understood when I used it everyday but now look at with utter confusion. It's definitely not a casual language. As a comparison, I peeked at some Delphi/pascal code I'd written and a book a few weeks back and it was still parseable by my brain years later.

No languages are casual. I wrote Perl for about 5 years and was super productive with, but haven't looked it for quite a while. Most energy these days goes into JavaScript/node and it devolves into gibberish really, really quickly. The community really dove into the punctuation-based syntax, preprocessors and meta languages head first and created a real Frankenstein. And they'll complain that Java or C# are too verbose and slow to work with.

Re: Dwindling CPAN Releases

#105

Post by unpixer » Thu, Aug 01, 2019, 2:11 PM UTC

latchkey wrote: post #48

tus88 wrote: post #19

It's interesting. I started Perl in around 2005, and moved entirely to Python in 2014, exactly when it reached it's peak and started to decline. Seems I wasn't the only one.

Now I feel old, I started with Perl 4 around 1992-1993. There wasn't even a CGI query args parser library yet, you had to roll your own.

My first exposure to Perl pattern-matching was a magic regex for parsing CGI input handed down to me by a more experienced coder. "Don't ask how this works."

Re: Dwindling CPAN Releases

#106

Post by caf » Thu, Aug 01, 2019, 2:14 PM UTC

barrkel wrote: post #12

benj111 wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"and rate of rate of increase negative" Are you a politician? Because that's a very round about way of putting it. :P If the rate of increase is negative, there is an actual absolute decline. Is that want you were meaning to say?

I said rate of rate of increase. The second derivative is negative at a local maximum. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Derivative_test#Second_derivat...

...and the sign of the second derivative flips at an inflection point.

Re: Dwindling CPAN Releases

#107

Post by futureastronaut » Thu, Aug 01, 2019, 2:26 PM UTC

tootie wrote: post #104

nkozyra wrote: post #61

Perl is the language I once understood when I used it everyday but now look at with utter confusion. It's definitely not a casual language. As a comparison, I peeked at some Delphi/pascal code I'd written and a book a few weeks back and it was still parseable by my brain years later.

No languages are casual. I wrote Perl for about 5 years and was super productive with, but haven't looked it for quite a while. Most energy these days goes into JavaScript/node and it devolves into gibberish really, really quickly. The community really dove into the punctuation-based syntax, preprocessors and meta languages head first and created a real Frankenstein. And they'll complain that Java or C# are too verbo…

> The community really dove into the punctuation-based syntax, preprocessors and meta languages head first and created a real Frankenstein.

More is on the way. Github issue thumbs up-driven development means it's the new C++ kitchen sink.

Re: Dwindling CPAN Releases

#108

Post by isostatic » Thu, Aug 01, 2019, 2:34 PM UTC

mattbillenstein wrote: post #44

isostatic wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I used python for a bit but switched to Perl because it 1) Works 2) Is ubiquitous 3) Is stable 4) Is normal (semicolons, braces etc)

> 1) Works Almost anything can "work" > 2) Is ubiquitous So is awk, don't write software in it. > 3) Is stable This will become questionable as Perl slips into non-maintained mode. > 4) Is normal (semicolons, braces etc) Perl syntax is very far from "normal"

> Almost anything can "work"

Yet after yesterday's attempt to get a small cherrypy webserver running, python doesn't.

Re: Dwindling CPAN Releases

#109

Post by isostatic » Thu, Aug 01, 2019, 2:39 PM UTC

lifthrasiir wrote: post #42

isostatic wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I used python for a bit but switched to Perl because it 1) Works 2) Is ubiquitous 3) Is stable 4) Is normal (semicolons, braces etc)

> 4) Is normal (semicolons, braces etc) What was your first programming language? Because what seems like normal to you mostly depends on you.

> What was your first programming language

QBasic, then Visual Basic for real programs.

Look across a bunch of common languages - Java, Perl, Python, Javascript, PHP, and of course C/C++/C#/ObjC, braces + semicolons. Even Bash and Go have braces.

Re: Dwindling CPAN Releases

#110

Post by cure » Thu, Aug 01, 2019, 2:50 PM UTC

MichaelMoser123 wrote: post #101

eruci wrote: post #89

There is more than one way to look at it. I've been coding in Perl for 20 years, I'm a CPAN author [1] and I just published my third CPAN contribution yesterday. I've written over half a million Perl lines of currently in use enterprise cloud software[2] and I'll keep coding in Perl because I don't like the big snake dictatorship of "There should be one — and preferably only one — obvious way to do it." [1] https://m…

"There should be one — and preferably only one — obvious way to do it." That is a python design principle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zen_of_Python Now there are multiple (sometimes very confusing) ways to import stuff in python, so I am not quite sure if this principle is being followed. https://realpython.com/absolute-vs-relative-python-imports/

The other place where this principle is completely ignored is when it comes to Python packaging, which is a complete and utter disaster.

There are many different ways to package Python, none of them are feature complete, and the result is an absolute maintenance nightmare for those of us who have to maintain tools that have Python dependencies.

Perl got packaging right, there's one way to do it, and it just works!