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Programming is hard, let's go scripting..

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Re: Programming is hard, let's go scripting..

#41

Post by bgilroy26 »

creamyhorror wrote: post #22
kamaal wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Perl 5 has nothing to do with Perl 6 development or even releases. Even after Perl 6 is released Perl 5 will still continue to evolve and grow. At the moment Perl 6 specification gives a good evolution map for Perl 5 development. So you need not to have to ever worry about Perl 6. Perl 5 is a solid language in itself. Perl has been amazingly useful since almost 25 years now. And anybody who denies this is simply trol…

I have hardly ever seen such high praise for a language. I guess I'll have to learn it sometime and see what the hoopla's about. With the Modern Perl book, of course, if it's still the best-of-breed then.

If you enjoy Modern Perl, check out Higher Order Perl. It's a guide to functional programming in Perl and it's full of hipster-programmery goodness!

Re: Programming is hard, let's go scripting..

#42

Post by autarch »

zby wrote: post #29
kamaal wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Perl 6 has very ambitious goals. One aspect of Perl 6 is it pays extreme emphasis on sane, safe extensibility. Perl 6 grammars are killer features. For all those people who wanted lisp like extensibility inside C kind of a language, Perl 6 will be a perfect match. Given those goals, Perl as a language has a long bright future. Because flexible and extensible languages evolve their way out of time. Compared to all lan…

Back-compat can have many meanings - but my understanding is that every major release does break some back-compat in some way - otherwise it would not be a major release. And if you think that binary compatibility is not be fair - then how about pseudo-hashes? This is not to say that I don't agree that Perl has perhaps the best back-compat of all the languages that still evolve - but these absolute statements have th…

I think pseudo-hashes were always marked as experimental, up until they were removed.

That said, I'm pretty sure you're right that backwards Per 5 broke backwards compatibility with Perl 4 (and presumably 4 with 3, etc.)

Re: Programming is hard, let's go scripting..

#44

Post by agentgt »

jrockway wrote: post #33
agentgt wrote: post #6

Programming is not hard. Getting people to buy your product or give you money... that's hard.

Being bad at programming is not hard, anyway.

I knew I was going to get downvoted to oblivion for that comment. But I still firmly believe it.

People are much harder to deal with. Much more dynamic. I'm confident the computer would not have downvoted me :)

BTW you apparently have a gazillion repo's in github but no blog ... writing is much harder than programming IMHO.

Re: Programming is hard, let's go scripting..

#47

Post by danso »

agentgt wrote: post #44
jrockway wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Being bad at programming is not hard, anyway.

I knew I was going to get downvoted to oblivion for that comment. But I still firmly believe it. People are much harder to deal with. Much more dynamic. I'm confident the computer would not have downvoted me :) BTW you apparently have a gazillion repo's in github but no blog ... writing is much harder than programming IMHO.

That's a non-sensical statement. Certain types of writing may be harder than certain types of programming. And vice versa.

Re: Programming is hard, let's go scripting..

#48

Post by _sh »

jrockway wrote: post #38
brlewis wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you have in mind a particular integration with the real world that is language-specific, but where DrScheme would not help a professional programmer ramp up familiarity with a Schemey way of doing it? I think I disagree with you, but have to understand what you're arguing to be sure.

Nope, I'm being more general. Throw darts at random programming ads. Take that job. Chances are, it will be something like "move QUUX formatted records from BAZ mainframe to new Oracle Windows Java 7.0 Lightweight Enterprise Server", rather than "start completely anew to help elementary school students learn calculus". Things like ad-hoc record parsing and network connectivity and the ability to easily fork() end up…

What you say is indeed true, if you take a monolithic approach to problem solving. And I tire of this approach--dammit, we're tool-builders! We have been shown the Unix Way, and yet we ignore it time and again, forcing us into suboptimal solutions to our problems.

Moving "QUUX formatted records from BAZ mainframe to new Oracle Windows Java 7.0 Lightweight Enterprise Server" involves these things: a source, a sink and the pipe character. Your source and sink may necessarily be in Java--meh, whatever works. But now you have a decoupled framework for doing these kinds of jobs, and you haven't invested any more time or effort than you would have with your one-off, inflexible solution. And you can now stuff anything in that pipeline. And I regularly use racket for exactly this, using protocol buffers as the pipe character. It's not rocket science, it's the Unix Way. People, embrace it and free yourself from the monolithic millstone!

Re: Programming is hard, let's go scripting..

#49

Post by atdt »

We think about extensibility a lot. We think about languages we don't know how to think about yet. But leaving spaces in the grammar for new languages is kind of like reserving some of our land for national parks and national forests. Or like an archaeologist not digging up half the archaeological site because we know our descendants will have even better analytical tools than we have.

This quote, and what little I've sampled of Perl 6, reminds me of a few lines from the movie Wonder Boys:

Grady, you know how in class you're always telling us that writers make choices? [...] And even though your book is really beautiful, I mean, amazingly beautiful, it's... it's at times... it's... very detailed. You know, with the genealogies of everyone's horses, and the dental records, and so on. And... I could be wrong, but it sort of reads in places like you didn't make any choices. At all.

Re: Programming is hard, let's go scripting..

#50

Post by elb0w »

stcredzero wrote: post #28
kamaal wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Perl 5 has nothing to do with Perl 6 development or even releases. Even after Perl 6 is released Perl 5 will still continue to evolve and grow. At the moment Perl 6 specification gives a good evolution map for Perl 5 development. So you need not to have to ever worry about Perl 6. Perl 5 is a solid language in itself. Perl has been amazingly useful since almost 25 years now. And anybody who denies this is simply trol…

Object oriented, functional, declarative you say it Perl has it. Its amazingly flexible, easy to learn and extensible. My first programming job was in Perl back in the late 90's. Loved it, but I have to say that the OO facilities left something to be desired. I found them fatiguing. It took Java, then Smalltalk for me to really get OO. Perl requires too much mastery of mechanism just to do objects, so it's not the be…

https://metacpan.org/module/Moose not the 90's anymore
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