Perl comes from the days when interpreted programming languages were invented as concrete solutions to general problems. Now we have reusable frameworks as concrete solutions, whereas high level languages have more general use cases.
The Joy of Perl (1998)
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Re: The Joy of Perl (1998)
#22I bet some younger HN readers are looking at this and wondering if the popularity off Perl at this point is primarily sentimental associations that older devs have with the early days of the Web when they could find artsy ways to explore a new emerging medium.
It is. Very much so.
Re: The Joy of Perl (1998)
#23Used to spend a ton of time writing Perl (see username). Moved on to better designed languages. Which are not hard to find. There are a few big issues with Perl 5 but the biggest is easily the mess of references vs flat values. Python, Ruby, JavaScript and many other dynamic languages do not make the programmer think about whether you are going to pass a data structure like an array or hash as a reference or direct v…
> join(‘,’,@{$foo->{‘bar’}})
foo.bar.join(',')Re: The Joy of Perl (1998)
#24Used to spend a ton of time writing Perl (see username). Moved on to better designed languages. Which are not hard to find. There are a few big issues with Perl 5 but the biggest is easily the mess of references vs flat values. Python, Ruby, JavaScript and many other dynamic languages do not make the programmer think about whether you are going to pass a data structure like an array or hash as a reference or direct v…
"Python, Ruby, JavaScript and many other dynamic languages do not make the programmer think about whether you are going to pass a data structure like an array or hash as a reference or direct value. Perl does."
If you don't think about these things in python, you're going to be scratching your head when you see something like this:
>>> foo = ['a','b','c']
>>> bar = foo
>>> bar[1] = 'z'
>>> foo
['a', 'z', 'c']Re: The Joy of Perl (1998)
#25I can't imagine programming in any other programming language than Perl.
I can’t imagine programming in Perl anymore. I did a bit in a previous job and it was a ball ache trying to remember the syntax and all it’s quirks. I don’t know why you’d want to use it over other popular scripting languages like JS/Ruby/Python. All have more active communities. AWS don’t even support Perl
Perl singlehandedly turned me off of using scripting languages for almost two decades. I stayed with C, C++, and C# and of course used Javascript for the web.
It wasn’t until I was “forced” to learn Python last year and started working heavily with AWS that I actually enjoyed scripting languages again for smallish glue type scripts.
This year I finally started using Node.
But yeah for career reasons, I wouldn’t tie my horse to Perl in 2019.
Re: The Joy of Perl (1998)
#26Earlier quoted context omitted.
I can’t imagine programming in Perl anymore. I did a bit in a previous job and it was a ball ache trying to remember the syntax and all it’s quirks. I don’t know why you’d want to use it over other popular scripting languages like JS/Ruby/Python. All have more active communities. AWS don’t even support Perl
Some workers complains about their tools. Other just use whatever, fix problems, and make money.
Until you need your next job and you see spending 10 years doing Perl was detrimental to your career...
Re: The Joy of Perl (1998)
#27I was basically introduced to functional programming through Higher Order Perl.
Re: The Joy of Perl (1998)
#28I did not know that Larry Wall wrote patch. I thought it came out with diff.
Re: The Joy of Perl (1998)
#29Used to spend a ton of time writing Perl (see username). Moved on to better designed languages. Which are not hard to find. There are a few big issues with Perl 5 but the biggest is easily the mess of references vs flat values. Python, Ruby, JavaScript and many other dynamic languages do not make the programmer think about whether you are going to pass a data structure like an array or hash as a reference or direct v…
> join(‘,’,@{$foo->{‘bar’}})
join ',', $foo->{'bar'}->@*
join ',', $foo->{'bar'}->@[2..5]Re: The Joy of Perl (1998)
#30Earlier quoted context omitted.
Ruby definitely has its niche in web development mainly due to Rails, Jekyll and Sinatra. Quite a weird choice for other things. Pretty sure Homebrew on Mac uses it. It’s not the most performant of languages (although it’s definitely getting better).
Homebrew is the only thing I think Ruby is perfect for. It's just a DSL for describing how to fetch and build a program, like Makefiles but more convenient.
Chef is the same kinda thing but for managing infrastructure (like Ansible for Python & Cake for .NET)
https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/configurati...