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Perl, the first postmodern computer language (1999)

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

#151

Post by doomvox »

richard_todd wrote: post #60
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…

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…

"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 ..."

There was some talk about that a few years back, but those ideas have largely been abandoned. They've also adopted the "steering committee" approach, and they have something like a formal RFC proceedure to talk over new proposals-- in general the project is in very good shape. And backwards compatibility is still the rule, unlike a lot of other projects out there.

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

#152

Post by doomvox »

richard_todd wrote: post #105
mfontani wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Well, there's certainly a deprecation cycle in play, and some things may be on their way out that I would rather see kept around (e.g. they seem to have given up on getting the case statement-- given/when-- working: it's tough to do it right without built-in types), but seriously you seem to be behind-the-times on how the project is being managed. If they implement a version 7.0 scheme again, I guarantee they'll do it without breakage: you'll need to say "use v7;" to turn it on.

I have a feeling you're reading Richardo Signes wrong, by the way-- he likes to play up what a negative kind-of-guy he is, and makes critical remarks about the state-of-perl in public that some people take a little too seriously. Perl-haters gotta hate, and they really loved to link to his talk with the title about how perl is an "Ongoing Disaster" or some such.

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

#153

Post by thesuperbigfrog »

SOLAR_FIELDS wrote: post #146
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…

Curious - is there a reason to use Perl (Wall's latest version, 5 or whatever) in 2022 if one has no familiarity with the language? What would be the major advantage of using Perl over its closest analogues, some bastardization of Bash and Python?

>> Curious - is there a reason to use Perl (Wall's latest version, 5 or whatever) in 2022 if one has no familiarity with the language? What would be the major advantage of using Perl over its closest analogues, some bastardization of Bash and Python?

It depends on what you are trying to do.

Perl excels at processing text particularly if you are familiar with regular expressions.

Perl mainstreamed regular expressions and most programming languages that support regular expressions support some subset of Perl regular expressions.

Perl is faster than both Bash and Python and scales up a bit better than Python as a project starts to grow because 'use strict' and 'use warnings' will catch many errors. Python has a better 'batteries included' standard library, so it tends to be better at prototyping than Perl unless you are pulling in libraries in which case it depends on what you are trying to do.

Perl can be more terse than Python, particularly if you are using built-in variables. However, this impacts legibility which is part of the reason why Perl is the target of 'executable line noise' jokes.

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

#154

Post by doomvox »

SOLAR_FIELDS wrote: post #146
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…

Curious - is there a reason to use Perl (Wall's latest version, 5 or whatever) in 2022 if one has no familiarity with the language? What would be the major advantage of using Perl over its closest analogues, some bastardization of Bash and Python?

Well, Larry Wall's latest project was called "Perl 6" but has been renamed "Raku"-- in belated recognition that it really is a new language, and Perl is going to continue being Perl.

The main reason to learn Raku at present is simply that it's profoundly different from most other things out there-- there's no particular "killer app" that's emerged for it, but it's unusual enough that this might happen yet (no one expected Perl would be critical for "Web 1.0" and the Human Genome Project...).

Some Raku features:

(1) it's numeric types include true rational numbers, so there's less chance of being tripped up by floating point approximations (e.g. 2/3 is really 2/3, and if you multiply by 3 later you get precisely 2). It also does big integers by default: you're less likely to have overflow problems.

(2) Raku's regular expressions have been redesigned from scratch, and it ships with expanded capabilities to compose them into larger structures called "grammars": Raku is a uniquely powerful tool for writing special-purpose parsers, ala domain-specific languages. (Note: this is how Raku parses itself-- it's not implemented in the usual lex and yacc style.)

(3) Extremly convenient features for handling CAP (concurrency, asynchrony, parallelism), possibly the easiest to use of any language.

As for Perl (meaning the original, Perl 5), it's vastly superior to traditional bash scripting because all the components were brought into one process where they could be made more consistent and talk to each other easily.

How Perl compares to Python is a little difficult for me to answer: I prefer Perl, but I could be biased on this one, and there's no question Python has quite a bit of momentum at present in a number of areas.

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

#155

Post by jlokier »

Perl is a surprisingly Lisp-like language, due to its very consistent approach to closures and statements-as-expressions. Its approach to references, which are reference-counted and have RAII with predictable destructors, is also very clean. I think most people don't notice that Perl is a cleaner and more consistent language in depth than it appears on the surface.

Criticisms of Perl often talk about the sigils and other punctuation characters which appear in normal Perl code, implying that's a big issue, or at least rather old-fashioned. (Although I really like Perl and got to know it intimately, especially the guts of the interpreter, I did feel it would have fared better without the sigils.)

That might be a fair criticism by modern standards, but if so, it annoys me that Perl gets singled out for punctuation while other popular languages don't. PHP has sigils everywhere, and many languages have some sigils. Rust has quite a lot of special punctuation syntax that has to be written often. Aside from sigils, Rust code looks to me like it has a similar amount of punctuation-oriented syntax as most of the Perl code I used to write.

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

#157

Post by doomvox »

fps_doug wrote: post #14
anthk wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Saying that to a lingüist it's... interesting. On Perl, CPAN was and it's still amazing, and lots of stuff came from that. For example, Mojolicious for the web, BioPerl for bioinformatics and Rivescript to write silly chatbots, among others. Oh, and pkg_* under OpenBSD. INB4 gen-z's rant on "PeRl It'S UnRead@ble", check the intro from "perldoc perlintro". EDIT: Unless I'm sure the deleted link it's right, I'd avoid p…

I'm more than two decades away from being gen-z, and I still agree with that sentiment. There might be that theoretical wise and disciplined Perl programmer writing well structured and readable code, but wherever I interfaced with people writing/maintaining Perl code, it was the most hastily thrown together crap that once was a small tool that "just worked" and then slowly grew completely out of hands over the years.…

"... but wherever I interfaced with people writing/maintaining Perl code, it was the most hastily thrown together crap"

The badly written stuff needs more "maintenance", and the people who need to work on it are more likely to complain (and I think you're stuck on confirmation bias).

In the late-90s, the early web gold rush was on, and a lot of amateurs started writing perl in a hurry as their first language. The fact that they could do anything at all is actually pretty amazing, and I'd say that's a point in perl's favor.

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

#158

Post by doomvox »

kerblang wrote: post #11

For years Mr Wall attempted to justify Perl as the manifestation of 90's neohippie culture, as this mashup of weirdness that was cool because it didn't worry about being particularly consistent with itself. I think the worst of it is when he draws parallels with the Dave Matthews Band. Ugh. Nothing screams "I'm soooo dated" like fixating on short-lived youth trends. Perhaps he should've described Perl as "hip hop" bu…

We're still reading the text of a speech from 1999, which would seem to say something in its favor.

Dated pop-culture references in something that's ~25 years old is hardly surprising.

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

#159

Post by forgotmypw17 »

SOLAR_FIELDS wrote: post #146
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…

Curious - is there a reason to use Perl (Wall's latest version, 5 or whatever) in 2022 if one has no familiarity with the language? What would be the major advantage of using Perl over its closest analogues, some bastardization of Bash and Python?

I use Perl over Bash because I'm more familiar with the C-like, PHP-like syntax with parentheses, curly braces, if/else, while, and sigils. I'm also a fan of both strict and taint, which have saved me countless hours.

I use Perl over Python because of the culture/tradition of not introducing breaking changes into the language/runtime, which has also saved me countless hours. I'm also a fan of arbitrary whitespace for formatting.

Perl is ubiquitous in the *nix world. Combined with its stability and my avoidance of third-party libraries, I can run my scripts basically anywhere without struggling with dependencies, version mismatches, etc.

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

#160

Post by matthewpersico »

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]`?

Because Perl is context sensitive and what we care about is not what is being stored but what is being accessed.

'array' is the variable.

'@array' gives me the list in 'array'.

'$array[1]' gives me the scalar ($) value at array[1].

`@array[3..7]` gives me the list (@) of values at array indexes 3-7, inclusive on both sides. (Why does Python use open ended ranges? ) (Why is Python's slicing syntax an inflexible loop? )

`@array[1]`, by the way gives me the list of values at array index 1, which is the same as `$array[1]`

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