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Learn Perl in about 2 hours 30 minutes

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Re: Learn Perl in about 2 hours 30 minutes

#81

Post by jeberle »

buckwild wrote: post #4
doctoboggan wrote: post #3

Would it be beneficial to know this alongside of Python, or is it more used instead of Python?

I personally found that I didn't need Perl at all. I am a bioinformatics programmer/scientist and Perl was the first language I learned. I find that whatever I can do in Perl I can do with bash/awk/sed--and whatever I can't do with bash/awk/sed I can do in Python. I've never been happier.

I agree w/ you about 90% on this. However, you're painting w/ a broad brush including Awk and Sed. I imagine beyond 10 lines of Awk (gsub, anyone?) or about 1 line of Sed things get tenuous, and you would want to reach for Perl or Python. Sed & Awk are great for tiny stuff, but wear thin fast. The realm of text-only problems, about 15 to 40 lines of code is where I find Perl shines. Python is probably my favorite language, but it can be horribly clunky for these sorts of tasks.

Re: Learn Perl in about 2 hours 30 minutes

#82

Post by kamaal »

derrickpetzold wrote: post #80
kamaal wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Legacy? I hear about new Perl projects starting in large enterprises everyday! Unless you are in the web programming domain(Somehow web developers think their's is the only software being written in the whole world) where your Python and Ruby frameworks seem to be famous. Perl is pretty big in the backend. Perl is here to stay, and its simply too useful to be going away anytime soon.

Just because you can do something doesn't mean you should...

I didn't get your point. I have found Perl(And many have) very useful for whatever we do.

So we continue to use it. Just because there is some new shiny stuff around, we don't use just for the sake for using it.

Trolling Perl to advocate Python hasn't helped for decades and won't help now either. A better debate will be to argue on technical merits. Trolling and whining gets people curious to verify if all that is true, thereby forcing them to read and some readers adopt it too.

Re: Learn Perl in about 2 hours 30 minutes

#83

Post by btilly »

bluekeybox wrote: post #38

If you really want to learn Perl, you must install the read-eval-print loop (REPL) utility. If you have never used this utility, I will have serious grounds to doubt your Perl skills. Unlike Ruby or Python (or most other modern high-level programming languages), Perl does not come with an interactive REPL shell, which makes no sense at all, since, due to Perl's obscure syntax, someone trying out Perl would benefit at…

If you have never used this utility, I will have serious grounds to doubt your Perl skills.

Doubt away.

I have never used that utility. Yet I have been programming Perl since the 90s, and am one of the top 10 posters on Perlmonks. (My nick there is tilly.)

Care to re-evaluate your criteria?

Re: Learn Perl in about 2 hours 30 minutes

#84

Post by bluekeybox »

btilly wrote: post #83
bluekeybox wrote: post #38

If you really want to learn Perl, you must install the read-eval-print loop (REPL) utility. If you have never used this utility, I will have serious grounds to doubt your Perl skills. Unlike Ruby or Python (or most other modern high-level programming languages), Perl does not come with an interactive REPL shell, which makes no sense at all, since, due to Perl's obscure syntax, someone trying out Perl would benefit at…

If you have never used this utility, I will have serious grounds to doubt your Perl skills. Doubt away. I have never used that utility. Yet I have been programming Perl since the 90s, and am one of the top 10 posters on Perlmonks. (My nick there is tilly.) Care to re-evaluate your criteria?

> I have been programming Perl since the 90s, and am one of the top 10 posters on Perlmonks... Care to re-evaluate your criteria?

Yes, for you, I can :) My post was meant only to advocate interactive learning (which I came believe to be faster than the usual code/modify/run cycle). Few things (if any) can beat 15 years of intense experience. Most people, though, whom one is likely to encounter in the real world who claim to know Perl will only have used it for a year or two, probably in combination with something else.

Re: Learn Perl in about 2 hours 30 minutes

#85

Post by peteretep »

btilly wrote: post #83
bluekeybox wrote: post #38

If you really want to learn Perl, you must install the read-eval-print loop (REPL) utility. If you have never used this utility, I will have serious grounds to doubt your Perl skills. Unlike Ruby or Python (or most other modern high-level programming languages), Perl does not come with an interactive REPL shell, which makes no sense at all, since, due to Perl's obscure syntax, someone trying out Perl would benefit at…

If you have never used this utility, I will have serious grounds to doubt your Perl skills. Doubt away. I have never used that utility. Yet I have been programming Perl since the 90s, and am one of the top 10 posters on Perlmonks. (My nick there is tilly.) Care to re-evaluate your criteria?

I'm in exactly the same boat. I've been doing Perl for 14 years, and never use a REPL. Occasionally I'll hit 'perl -e ""' on the command line, which I guess is a similar idea...

Re: Learn Perl in about 2 hours 30 minutes

#86

Post by bluekeybox »

peteretep wrote: post #85
btilly wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you have never used this utility, I will have serious grounds to doubt your Perl skills. Doubt away. I have never used that utility. Yet I have been programming Perl since the 90s, and am one of the top 10 posters on Perlmonks. (My nick there is tilly.) Care to re-evaluate your criteria?

I'm in exactly the same boat. I've been doing Perl for 14 years, and never use a REPL. Occasionally I'll hit 'perl -e ""' on the command line, which I guess is a similar idea...

Hey I didn't mean to offend Perl long-timers. See my response to btilly...

Hacker News is a bit of an exception to what you find in the real world (where 3 years of experience with a language can be considered as better than average).

Re: Learn Perl in about 2 hours 30 minutes

#87

Post by chromatic »

wallfly wrote: post #76
chromatic wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Anecdote which amuses me: I find JavaScript tolerable thanks to Joose and other ideas borrowed from Perl.

Not sure if you'd have any thoughts on this matter... The JavaScript community as a whole (seen especially in the direction of node.js + NPM) is moving away from global namespaces and toward the "module pattern" and dependency injection (note: I had no idea what those terms really meant 6 months ago). Presently, Joose3 goes against that grain. For example, if in a node.js script you: require('joose') if (Joose) { con…

I haven't written a lot of Joose code, but I use anonymous classes and store their constructors as attributes of a lexically scoped object I inject where I need it, so as to avoid global pollution. So far it works nicely.

Re: Learn Perl in about 2 hours 30 minutes

#88

Post by Mithaldu »

Swannie wrote: post #43
michaelpinto wrote: post #27

I've been working with Perl programmers for just about ten years now and the one thing I've sadly learned is that while many folks claim to know Perl, but only a small group can do it well. (although granted you can apply this reality to any other programming language)

"Write once, read never" comes to mind. So many single/double char operators which need to be memorised with Perl, before you can start comprehending the programs. Not to mention Perl hackers used to pride themselves on super succinct code - in certain circles it use to be popular to include one liners to do complex stuff in email signatures. (Not complaining though, Perl was the first language I used, and probably t…

You should take a look at this: http://www.reddit.com/r/perl/comments/j1ekt/writeonly_my_ass...

Re: Learn Perl in about 2 hours 30 minutes

#89

Post by chromatic »

derrickpetzold wrote: post #79
rjbond3rd wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think you read what you're responding to. How can they all have an "unparalleled extension ecosystem"?

Thank you I did read the post. Python has pypi. Ruby has gems. I'm not going to google the rest but if they don't have one there is no reason why they can't. And FYI pypi is better than CPAN so all the other stuff in the that post is crap imho. I was a Perl dev for ~10 years. Now have about 5 worth of Python. So thank you.

I'm not going to google the rest but if they don't have one there is no reason why they can't.

That somehow fails to convince me that other language ecosystems parallel the CPAN in breadth, scope, maturity, and ecosystem. See CPAN Testers, for example.

Re: Learn Perl in about 2 hours 30 minutes

#90

Post by Mithaldu »

derrickpetzold wrote: post #79
rjbond3rd wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think you read what you're responding to. How can they all have an "unparalleled extension ecosystem"?

Thank you I did read the post. Python has pypi. Ruby has gems. I'm not going to google the rest but if they don't have one there is no reason why they can't. And FYI pypi is better than CPAN so all the other stuff in the that post is crap imho. I was a Perl dev for ~10 years. Now have about 5 worth of Python. So thank you.

I don't know about python, but ruby's gems are quite inferior. Just two points:

gems has no idea if any specific gem is already installed, so if you ask it to, it will just install over whatever is there, no matter if it's the same or not.

Additionally it does not automatically run tests and abort if they fail, so the chance of installing a broken gem over your existing working gem is pretty big.

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