The Joy of Perl (1998)
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The Joy of Perl (1998)
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Re: The Joy of Perl (1998)
#2A thread from 2012: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3728313
Re: The Joy of Perl (1998)
#3> it's a completely different beast, a highly complex "scripting" language
I learned long ago to not call my programs scripts, because many people interpreted (sorry) this negatively.
Re: The Joy of Perl (1998)
#4> it's a completely different beast, a highly complex "scripting" language I learned long ago to not call my programs scripts, because many people interpreted (sorry) this negatively.
In those days "real programmers" were doing C and ASM, and they anyway considered all other languages as a joke :P
Re: The Joy of Perl (1998)
#5Perl isn't so bad once you learn all the little gotchas, but it's not something I would recommend to anyone unless they're scraping clis. It has too many foot guns, and the pool of engineers to choose from seems too small.
Re: The Joy of Perl (1998)
#6Oh man, this brings back memories... when this article was written, I was a high school freshman, and I had just bought Teach Yourself Perl 5 in 21 Days so I could learn how to write my own custom CGI scripts for my geeky personal webpage. It was my first true programming language, after childhood flings with BASIC.
Also, I find it humorous how the term “hacker” is used here to refer to literally anyone who works on computers. I suppose the title of this site retains that meaning...
Re: The Joy of Perl (1998)
#7After I first got online in 1995, I had noticed that Perl was this thing that everyone was using to create dynamic HTTP server behavior.
I ended up using what I knew instead: Turbo Pascal + some oddball "wincgi" interface.
Later I caved and started using Perl, since everyone else was using it. It was a pretty weird experience. I did my first paid "consulting", for a company from the tiny place where I grew up, building a "web app" using Perl. This happened during the first year of university studies. I got paid $12/hour. That was so much money to me, back then! (I was like 18 or 19.)
This experience is where I grew to hate Perl and learned to love more structured languages.
A year later in 1997, I ended up working full-time with the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pike_(programming_language) instead. This was essentially a precursor of Dart.
Re: The Joy of Perl (1998)
#8A thread from 2012: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3728313
Yeah kamaal’s comment on that thread shows just how insanely terse Perl can be... truly the king of one-liners
Re: The Joy of Perl (1998)
#9We use perl to power some web services that have been running a long time. It’s a work horse.
I’m ok with it but it is hard to read, I think because there are so many ways to do everything. it takes a bit to get used to some of the syntax ($@~). I was told my perl was very c like during a review.
It’s great for text manipulation though.
I just remember Rasmus (of php) talking about how he always expected any language to take over php but perl made some design decisions that made it unpalatable to hosting providers.
It’s still my go to for processing large text files.
Re: The Joy of Perl (1998)
#10> it's a completely different beast, a highly complex "scripting" language I learned long ago to not call my programs scripts, because many people interpreted (sorry) this negatively.
In those days "real programmers" were doing C and ASM, and they anyway considered all other languages as a joke :P
Kernigan didn't! The number of little languages he made is astounding.