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Perl, the first postmodern computer language (1999)

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

#101

Post by xorcist »

Arathorn wrote: post #61
catchclose8919 wrote: post #40

...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…

It's easy; PHP is/was: Whilst the equivalent Perl at the time would be: #!/usr/local/bin/perl print "Content-Type: text/html\r\n\r\n"; print " "; print "Hello world"; print " "; or possibly... #!/usr/local/bin/perl use strict; use warnings; use CGI; my $q = CGI->new; print $q->header('text/html'); print $q->start_html(); print "Hello world"; print $q->end_html(); ...if you were being a bit more more fancy. In other w…

That was certainly part of the convenience out of the box. But you could have done something similar with mod_perl since it had filters that could act on every page. Then embperl started to gain popularity some time in 1996, which was decidedly even more like a templating engine, and after that came Mason.

PHP really exploded in popularity when web hosting took off. It had a safe mode that made it possible to for several customers to co-exist in the same web server, without having the ability to read each other's files.

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

#102

Post by lifefeed »

a4isms wrote: post #95
a4isms wrote: post #91

Modernism: "Less is more"—Mies van der Rohe Postmodernism: "Less is a bore"—Robert Venturi ————— Guided by these famous quotes, if I were to call a programming language a "Modernist" language, I'd think of something that prizes elegance. It can't just be a small language, it has to be a small language with a few features powerful enough to actually do more. I would think of languages like Scheme or Smalltalk or C as…

p.s. This is fun. So what constitutes a Brutalist programming language? It should be something that: - Exposes the construction materials - Implies mass and permanence - Is usually institutional, e.g. libraries, government buildings, public housing. Only rarely shopping centres or company head offices (which were usually done in the "International" style when Brutalism was a thing). What fits that bill? How about SQL…

Ada.

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

#103

Post by the_only_law »

a4isms wrote: post #95
a4isms wrote: post #91

Modernism: "Less is more"—Mies van der Rohe Postmodernism: "Less is a bore"—Robert Venturi ————— Guided by these famous quotes, if I were to call a programming language a "Modernist" language, I'd think of something that prizes elegance. It can't just be a small language, it has to be a small language with a few features powerful enough to actually do more. I would think of languages like Scheme or Smalltalk or C as…

p.s. This is fun. So what constitutes a Brutalist programming language? It should be something that: - Exposes the construction materials - Implies mass and permanence - Is usually institutional, e.g. libraries, government buildings, public housing. Only rarely shopping centres or company head offices (which were usually done in the "International" style when Brutalism was a thing). What fits that bill? How about SQL…

COBOL, ABAP

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

#104

Post by a4isms »

a4isms wrote: post #91

Modernism: "Less is more"—Mies van der Rohe Postmodernism: "Less is a bore"—Robert Venturi ————— Guided by these famous quotes, if I were to call a programming language a "Modernist" language, I'd think of something that prizes elegance. It can't just be a small language, it has to be a small language with a few features powerful enough to actually do more. I would think of languages like Scheme or Smalltalk or C as…

I’m adding SNOBOL to my list of modernist languages. “Everything is pattern-matching” fits the modernist ethos.

On the other hand, what about APL? Although the syntax looks just as much like line noise as Perl’s syntax, it is actually a very elegant language. Is APL also a modernist language?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a9xAKttWgP4

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

#105

Post by richard_todd »

mfontani wrote: post #83
richard_todd wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, I agree with you. For fun I built Perl 1 a couple years ago and was amazed at how similar it was to Perl 5. In fact most of the test suite from Perl 1 runs unmodified on Perl 5. The subroutine calling syntax was different (it used `do xxx();` I think) so those tests fail. But unfortunately, some Perl devs in recent years keep thinking that what they need to do is break stuff to "modernize". They keep eyeing goa…

> They keep eyeing goals like turning `strict` on by default Not unless you declare a version. Old style perl will continue to work as before. If you declare something like: use v5.40; ... then, and only then, you'll get strict/warnings/whatever turned on. Your 20 year old script can continue to run just fine.

That doesn't really capture what's been happening. If feature bundles are still today's plan, it's only because the multiple attempts to get strict on by default have so far all been defeated. They are still pushing forward adding options to disable features like indirect calls, multidimensional hashes, bareword filehandles, etc. And you can bet that at some point they will revive the idea of moving to Perl7/8/9 and permanently remove those things as they go.

Some--not all--of the people working on perl really want so-called "cruft" to disappear. I'm not a fan of that attitude for such an old language with such a rich history of backwards-compatibility, and I definitely don't think it's going to accomplish some kind of perl renaissance. I think it would be better to double down on what makes perl unique. When I watch Signes giving a talk like https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FlGpiS39NMY where he shakes his head at variables like `$;` or `$,` (29:20 in the video) ... it looks like the leaders of perl hate how strange it is. That worries people like me, who love perl _because_ of its quirkiness, not in spite of it. Surely people who want something more consistent have moved to Ruby long ago.

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

#106

Post by scruple »

forgotmypw17 wrote: post #35

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 only touched Perl a little bit, at the start of my career in the mid-to-late 00s. I didn't hate it. For our specific use case, which was generating reports from large groups of text-based log files, it was wonderful.

I'm curious, though, do you have any Perl programs you've worked on recently that are public? I'd love to take a look at how people are writing Perl these days...

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

#107

Post by [deleted] »

twic wrote: post #36
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…

> Perl evolved from being a better AWK awk has named parameters! Perl was a step backwards!

[deleted]

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

#108

Post by ecef9-8c0f-4374 »

twic wrote: post #36
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…

> Perl evolved from being a better AWK awk has named parameters! Perl was a step backwards!

Well it's your lucky day. Named parameters are perl since 5.20 ... as an "experimental" feature ...

Now you can write.

use v5.20; use feature 'signatures';

sub print_text( $param1 , $language = "perl", $years = 10 ) { say "I would have loved this $language $param1 more then $years years ago"; }

print_text "feature"

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

#109

Post by ff317 »

Arathorn wrote: post #61
catchclose8919 wrote: post #40

...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…

It's easy; PHP is/was: Whilst the equivalent Perl at the time would be: #!/usr/local/bin/perl print "Content-Type: text/html\r\n\r\n"; print " "; print "Hello world"; print " "; or possibly... #!/usr/local/bin/perl use strict; use warnings; use CGI; my $q = CGI->new; print $q->header('text/html'); print $q->start_html(); print "Hello world"; print $q->end_html(); ...if you were being a bit more more fancy. In other w…

+1 to that. I'll add the other thing that gave PHP an edge at the time:

Installing any major work built in Perl back then was a nightmare of installing all the underlying dependency modules, often into the system directories. It didn't have a clean, standardized way to package up a script + dependencies easily, and dependency management was hellish, especially with many key modules needing platform-specific C compilation.

At that time commercial "shared" hosting was still common: many customers sharing one linux webhosting box and uploading scripts to via FTP, with no access to or control over the underlying system. If the webhost supported PHP, you could upload a php script and it Just Worked. Not so with Perl!

Perl was by far the superior language, but it just wasn't the superior experience for a beginning web developer who mostly just wanted to embed a tiny amount of CGI functionality in a static HTML page, and then upload and run it pretty much anywhere with no fuss.

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

#110

Post by dmux »

Perl was the first dynamic language I learned after taking most of my college courses in Java. It was an eye opening experience in many regards: ease of standing up a web app via CGI.pm, dynamic dispatch tables using anonymous sub procedures, an OOP system based on "blessed" data structures, access to the symbol table, etc. In the last couple of years I've gotten into learning Common Lisp and it's surprising how many similarities there appear to be. I'm actually kind of surprised that given Perl's ability to change packages in an ad-hoc fashion that some type of live programming system was never developed for it.
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