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Perl, the first postmodern computer language (1999)

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Re: Perl, the first postmodern computer language (1999)

#21

Post by dhosek »

leoc wrote: post #3

Reposting my old comment https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10774245 : > People seem to have forgotten that when Perl evolved from being a better AWK to the paradigm example of the modern "scripting language", Larry Wall explicitly described this as a rejection of the Unix small-tools philosophy. http://www.linux-mag.com/id/322/ ("But Perl was actually much more countercultural than you might think. It was intended…

Having dealt with the clunky record structures of 60s operating systems, they did have their advantages, but the spread of cross-platform tools in the 80s and 90s killed them since Unix only knew byte streams. There are, I think some vestiges of it in the distinction between text and binary files on Windows (assuming that this still exists), but otherwise Unix’s everything is a stream of bytes has won. I kind of miss knowing that I had a file consisting of, e.g., 256-byte blocks.

Re: Perl, the first postmodern computer language (1999)

#22

Post by mistrial9 »

tootie wrote: post #20
snorkel wrote: post #5

Perl rose to popularity because early web development was all about text processing (reading web forms and outputting HTML) and Perl made that easier (regex deluxe) than other choices on unix at the time. It became the lingua franca of web developers. Perl 5 made heavy use of symbols so it was visually noisy, and then Perl 6 came along and added even more magic meanings to other symbols, and that was a tipping point…

As someone who spent many years loving Perl, I counter that literally every programming language is obtuse and overloaded with meaningless symbols. And I'd also credit Perl's rise to Lincoln Stein who wrote CGI.pm which was at the time the absolute state of the art for managing web applications with Apache and mod_cgi.

yes and, one of Perl's design goals was literally "report generation" .. which it turns out, might be in HTML format

Re: Perl, the first postmodern computer language (1999)

#23

Post by cestith »

anthk wrote: post #15
cestith wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Please don't post links to pirated content.

I think Orelly themselves put these for free back in the day in its own domain. I have to seek archive.org in order to be sure. I tought that because most of the books are outdated (15 years on IT it's an epoch), albeit the sed/awk/perl/*sh and Sendmail books are still godly useful.

I actually received a free book from O'Reilly once for pointing out the exact site you mentioned, so their lawyers could address it.

If you want these books very cheaply, the Perl CD Bookshelf usually sells for about $5 used. You get Perl in a Nutshell in print and a bunch of the other books on CD.

A better introduction to Perl these days is Modern Perl, which is available to read online for free or you can pay for a print book. http://modernperlbooks.com/

Re: Perl, the first postmodern computer language (1999)

#24

Post by simonh »

leoc wrote: post #3

Reposting my old comment https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10774245 : > People seem to have forgotten that when Perl evolved from being a better AWK to the paradigm example of the modern "scripting language", Larry Wall explicitly described this as a rejection of the Unix small-tools philosophy. http://www.linux-mag.com/id/322/ ("But Perl was actually much more countercultural than you might think. It was intended…

I think Unix's refusal to impose arbitrary structure on data is what has enabled a lot of the innovation and experimentation with alternative ways of organising and accessing data. Binary blob, SQL, NoSQL, key/value, column oriented, etc, etc Unix doesn't care. It just gets out of your way and lets you do your thing.

A lot of projects tried to implement opinionated OSes to the point that the OS was really an application. I'm thinking of Sprite and Amoeba, which attempted to abstract out the network and present a unified interface to accessing resources, and fancy storage systems, but in doing so impose opinionated interfaces on that access.

That's half way between an OS and an application like Hadoop, or Kafka, but you couldn't effectively develop something like Hadoop or Kafka, with your own optimisations and implementation tradeoffs on one of these things because the implementations or access models would clash.

Re: Perl, the first postmodern computer language (1999)

#27

Post by daneel_w »

snorkel wrote: post #5

Perl rose to popularity because early web development was all about text processing (reading web forms and outputting HTML) and Perl made that easier (regex deluxe) than other choices on unix at the time. It became the lingua franca of web developers. Perl 5 made heavy use of symbols so it was visually noisy, and then Perl 6 came along and added even more magic meanings to other symbols, and that was a tipping point…

> Readability of code is paramount.

For almost all languages, Perl included, this onus is mainly on the programmer. You can churn out gritty spaghetti in almost any language. Perl code doesn't have to look like what Perl programmers put out in the 90s. It's an old misconception that people refuse to let go of.

Re: Perl, the first postmodern computer language (1999)

#28

Post by peelle »

nmfisher wrote: post #9
leoc wrote: post #3

Reposting my old comment https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10774245 : > People seem to have forgotten that when Perl evolved from being a better AWK to the paradigm example of the modern "scripting language", Larry Wall explicitly described this as a rejection of the Unix small-tools philosophy. http://www.linux-mag.com/id/322/ ("But Perl was actually much more countercultural than you might think. It was intended…

Interesting take, but as someone who still works regularly with the shell, I'd say there is still a place for small core utils connected together with pipes/textual streams. If we're talking parsing and chopping up text files, I can usually whip up something with awk/jq/cut/whatever in far less time than writing an equivalent Python script. There's a threshold where you prefer to switch to the scripting language for…

I agree with this threshold idea, and I would argue that Perl and probably Ruby also have a lower threshold for switching than Python. Nothing against Python.

Re: Perl, the first postmodern computer language (1999)

#30

Post by cafard »

snorkel wrote: post #5

Perl rose to popularity because early web development was all about text processing (reading web forms and outputting HTML) and Perl made that easier (regex deluxe) than other choices on unix at the time. It became the lingua franca of web developers. Perl 5 made heavy use of symbols so it was visually noisy, and then Perl 6 came along and added even more magic meanings to other symbols, and that was a tipping point…

I first encountered Perl as Perl 4, which certainly had the @ and $ sigils. I had been using Perl 5 for a while before using it in any web development. I think that Perl 6 contributed to Perl's decline much more by the long delay and certainly than by anything it had when it appeared.

Edit: and Perl 4 had the % sigil.

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