51–60 of 225 posts
Perl is the sexiest programming language because “there’s more than one way to do it.”
Just reading this sentence give me horrors.
A developer has a problem they cannot solve and so they decide to use perl. The developer now has two problems.
hah - "peak idiom" for that was when Mr Marketing and Sales from Hawaii, Guy Kawasaki, said that on stage to a bunch of developers. I heard it. It was because the Marketing and Sales-turned "software leaders" couldn't read a regex.
I love Perl. I use almost none of its more esoteric features, and just write "classic procedural" code, mostly using command-line utilities instead of third-party modules for anything I don't want to write myself (mainly cryptography), and I am so fucking happy not having to deal with breaking changes in my language, a rare quality these days. I used a machine with a 9-year-old distro on it for a few months, and all…
I don't know if its backwards compatibility reaches into the 90s but I've been using ruby for this for like a decade now. Most envs that ship with anything ship with ruby and I've only very rarely run into version problems. I think people tend to associate it only with a certain era of web dev, but it has remained a good scripting language with a large, consistent, well-documented standard library for a long time now…
The compatibility really does stretch back all the way to '94.
...to this day, I still can't wrap my head on how PHP even got to exist in a world where Perl was already filling the web niche just fine. Also, if they wouldn't have made it too-weird-for-math-and-physics people, Perl would've probably filled Python's niche too. And with that kind of resources focused on it, Perl 6 could've actually turned up into a clean nice new language that would've unified us all by also suppor…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
hah - "peak idiom" for that was when Mr Marketing and Sales from Hawaii, Guy Kawasaki, said that on stage to a bunch of developers. I heard it. It was because the Marketing and Sales-turned "software leaders" couldn't read a regex.
I write regex all the time and I can't read a regex. It's a powerful tool and that's a very valid complaint about it.
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…
I love Perl. I use almost none of its more esoteric features, and just write "classic procedural" code, mostly using command-line utilities instead of third-party modules for anything I don't want to write myself (mainly cryptography), and I am so fucking happy not having to deal with breaking changes in my language, a rare quality these days. I used a machine with a 9-year-old distro on it for a few months, and all…
I don't know if its backwards compatibility reaches into the 90s but I've been using ruby for this for like a decade now. Most envs that ship with anything ship with ruby and I've only very rarely run into version problems. I think people tend to associate it only with a certain era of web dev, but it has remained a good scripting language with a large, consistent, well-documented standard library for a long time now…
I think it's the sysadmin culture. If your scripts are used by thousands of different servers hosting custom web apps and strange databases you'll run into every possible bug fast.
I love Perl. I use almost none of its more esoteric features, and just write "classic procedural" code, mostly using command-line utilities instead of third-party modules for anything I don't want to write myself (mainly cryptography), and I am so fucking happy not having to deal with breaking changes in my language, a rare quality these days. I used a machine with a 9-year-old distro on it for a few months, and all…
But unfortunately, some Perl devs in recent years keep thinking that what they need to do is break stuff to "modernize". They keep eyeing goals like turning `strict` on by default, and eliminating lesser-used features, which will surely break untold numbers of 20-year-old scripts.
I think there is some low-level anxiety among some of their developers that interest in their language has basically evaporated and they keep reaching for a silver bullet that doesn't exist. I think they are crazy ("perl 7... now 10% more like python!") but it's open-source so in the worst case I'm sure someone will keep a traditional perl from bit-rotting.
edit: I had made a short blog post about playing with perl 1: https://rwtodd.org/2020/Jun/building-perl-1