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Perl, the first postmodern computer language (1999)

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

#121

Post by anthk »

pseudostem wrote: post #112
forgotmypw17 wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ruby is great, and I know people who swear by it, but I've yet to come across a GNU/Linux distro which didn't come with Perl installed, while Ruby is not a given in the default, e.g. my current Manjaro. The compatibility really does stretch back all the way to '94.

On OpenBSD, some of the scripts or utils (mandoc) are written in Perl because the developers prefer it. There have been some email chains on the mailing lists about having Perl in base. Most of them are interesting to read.

The pkg_* suite it's written in Perl.

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

#122

Post by anthk »

thesuperbigfrog wrote: post #113
tenebrisalietum wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Only because Perl takes heavy inspiration and syntax from Unix shells.

It's actually a bit more than that. In "Windows Powershell in Action", Bruce Payette (one of the co-designers of Powershell) states: "NOTE PowerShell uses the at symbol (@) in a few places, has $_ as a default variable, and uses & as the function call operator. These elements lead people to say that PowerShell looks like Perl." "In practice, at one point, we did use Perl as a root language, and these elements stem fr…

Perl had an amazing Win32 support back in the day, and still does.

https://perldoc.perl.org/Win32

https://metacpan.org/search?size=20&q=win32

RAS, OLE, COM, ODBC. Perl did magick on NT/2K/XP.

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

#124

Post by biomcgary »

hedora wrote: post #77
nmfisher wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Most awk/cut/whatever commands can be done with perl -ne in about 2x the keystrokes, but you don't need to learn the other tools. In Python, the multiplier is much higher, and I could never get the oneliner stuff to work.

I use cut, grep, uniq, etc. a lot for processing largish files (multiple GB), but also use perl oneliners generously. Never took to awk for some reason. These days I write Go for anything larger than a oneliner, but I've added a lot of smallish Go CLI commands to use in pipes, too.

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

#125

Post by scelerat »

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 feel like PHP was the first big blow to Perl's king-of-the-web status. Python and especially Ruby+Rails knocked Perl off many people's radars for good.

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

#126

Post by bmn__ »

ecef9-8c0f-4374 wrote: post #108
twic wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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"

This already was available more than ten years ago, you simply had to install a module.

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

#128

Post by bmn__ »

thesuperbigfrog wrote: post #113
tenebrisalietum wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Only because Perl takes heavy inspiration and syntax from Unix shells.

It's actually a bit more than that. In "Windows Powershell in Action", Bruce Payette (one of the co-designers of Powershell) states: "NOTE PowerShell uses the at symbol (@) in a few places, has $_ as a default variable, and uses & as the function call operator. These elements lead people to say that PowerShell looks like Perl." "In practice, at one point, we did use Perl as a root language, and these elements stem fr…

> whipupitude quotient

That's an axis, not a quotient. See page 2/slide 3&4: https://www.shlomifish.org/lecture/Perl/Newbies/vhll-slides....>

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

#129

Post by munificent »

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…

C++ is absolutely the world's foremost brutalist language.

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

#130

Post by bmn__ »

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.

CGI.pm is a port of Perl 4 cgi-lib.pl. Credit: http://cgi-lib.berkeley.edu/#credit
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