Perl, the first postmodern computer language (1999)

Post by bmn__ » Wed, May 04, 2022, 8:19 PM UTC

SideburnsOfDoom wrote: post #84

hedora wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One thing I like about the sigils is that they make bad ideas hard to type. Want to pass me a hashtable of lambdas that return arrays of alternating functions and regexps? Go ahead. Show me how to invoke it. I'm waitng. Python (which has all of the type safety and expressivity of perl) allows such abominations to hide behind clean looking syntax. Sigils also improve readability. Bad Perl looks like serial port noise.…

> arrays of alternating functions and regexps many languages will allow you to succinctly express the concept of "the type of this element is a or b" e.g. typescript: https://www.typescriptlang.org/docs/handbook/2/everyday-type... Rust: https://doc.rust-lang.org/book/ch06-01-defining-an-enum.html F# : https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/fsharp/language-refe... IDK, allowing that kind of type to be declared seems…

    [\&some_function, qr/some_regex/, \&another_function, qr/another_regex/]

Post by bmn__ » Wed, May 04, 2022, 8:23 PM UTC

tenebrisalietum wrote: post #64

jkh1 wrote: post #59

Perl was the first language I used professionally and I used it almost exclusively for years. I don't understand all the negative comments about its use of sigils, I find them useful and I never got the impression that they made the code less readable but maybe that's because I was never taught the gospel of computer science :) I also appreciate the extended backwards compatibility. I still occasionally run decade-ol…

Here's one reason why sigils could be considered to suck. `@array` - array of values. `$array[1]` - get element 1 of the array. `$array` - What do you think this does? Why can't we just `@array[1]`?

Post by HeckFeck » Wed, May 04, 2022, 8:36 PM UTC

anthk wrote: post #122

thesuperbigfrog wrote: post #113

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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.

Post by anthk » Wed, May 04, 2022, 8:42 PM UTC

ff317 wrote: post #109

Arathorn wrote: post #61

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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 compila…

Post by dhosek » Wed, May 04, 2022, 8:46 PM UTC

tenebrisalietum wrote: post #62

dhosek wrote: post #21

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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'd have to look into it, but I think the whole reason for text vs. binary demarcation is the fact that ASCII text (not Unicode, old-school ASCII with valid characters 0x01-0x7F) could be sent over a 7-bit serial interface and binary needed that extra bit so you had to introduce overhead to make sure everything reached the other side. Because you might have had actual 7-bit serial (or less) teletypewriters connected…