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Programming is hard, let's go scripting..

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

#81

Post by chromatic »

danssig wrote: post #77
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 don't generally see sales pitches of this level on sites actually selling something . >And anybody who denies this is simply trolling. Logical fallacy: Appeal to emotion. "My argument cannot be argued with because " is always a logical fallacy. "amazingly useful" is subjective, so of course it can be argued and doing so is not trolling but perfectly reasonable. Don't make claims you don't wish to back up. >Its usef…

You could never mention Perl online or around Perl people without having to listen to the same tired tautologies about how incredibly powerful it is (wtf have you been using to think this?), etc.

Speaking of misleading vividness....

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

#82

Post by jrockway »

_sh wrote: post #48
jrockway wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

You're assuming that BAZ mainframe wants to let me move data away. They don't, so the only way to do so is with ugly hacks. That's the bulk of programming: making things that don't want to interoperate interoperate.

If everything was a service, then everything would be easy, and our tools would look a lot different. But if you can't change the world, you can at least make living in an imperfect world easy, and that's what Perl tries to do.

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

#83

Post by jleader »

masak wrote: post #73
jleader wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From what I've read various places (but can't find a reference at the moment), the version bump from 3 to 4 was just to be able to have the Camel book coincide with a major version (i.e. "this book describes Perl 4" instead of "this book describes Perl 3.1.4.1.5" or whatever).

Reference: http://perldoc.perl.org/perlhist.html

Heh, thanks! I read through the whole thing very carefully before posting, and couldn't find it. Now I see it's in the Introduction: "Perl 4 introduced the first Camel book. Really. We mostly just switched version numbers so the book could refer to 4.000."

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

#84

Post by _sh »

jrockway wrote: post #82
_sh wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

You're assuming that BAZ mainframe wants to let me move data away. They don't, so the only way to do so is with ugly hacks. That's the bulk of programming: making things that don't want to interoperate interoperate. If everything was a service, then everything would be easy, and our tools would look a lot different. But if you can't change the world, you can at least make living in an imperfect world easy, and that's…

If the mainframe won't cooperate, you'll have work to do no matter what. But you can isolate that work into as little as possible. That is what the Unix tools do.

Everything is a service, if you make it so. A component is a service, offering the functionality of its interface. The 'wc' tool is a service--its interface is its command-line switches. And you're right, when everything is a service, everything is easy (I'd say easier).

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

#85

Post by kamaal »

danssig wrote: post #77
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 don't generally see sales pitches of this level on sites actually selling something . >And anybody who denies this is simply trolling. Logical fallacy: Appeal to emotion. "My argument cannot be argued with because " is always a logical fallacy. "amazingly useful" is subjective, so of course it can be argued and doing so is not trolling but perfectly reasonable. Don't make claims you don't wish to back up. >Its usef…

tl;dr of your post.

'I don't like Perl, so don't speak good about it. And if you do I will troll you.'

Nothing that you can do will make Perl less enjoyable, less powerful or less useful or any thing.

All I could infer from your post was you hate Perl, and you just can't stand somebody talking good about it.

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

#86

Post by kamaal »

irahul wrote: post #76
kamaal wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sorry! I shouldn't have hurt your religion at the first place.

> Sorry! I shouldn't have hurt your religion at the first place. In place of spewing this nonsensical shit, you could have quoted me an example of "exponential gains". Out of curiosity, have you actually programmed in Lisp or Haskell? I am not saying you have, I am not saying you haven't; it's just that people who claim "fuck yeah macros - now I am 100x more productive" are mostly people who haven't actually used the…

Well I should have learned long back to not argue with impolite people.

This is one lesson I'm not going to forget.

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

#87

Post by kamaal »

read_wharf wrote: post #79
kamaal wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I gave you the solid things, but you give 'You aint gonna need it' kind of answer to everything Python doesn't have. Coming to asking people forcefully shorten their code blocks. It's none of language's business to dictate its style on me and steal my freedom. A language is supposed to behave the way I want. That's its very purpose. No multiline lambdas, No CPAN equivalent, Seamless interaction with shell like $outpu…

"Coming to asking people forcefully shorten their code blocks. It's none of language's business to dictate its style on me and steal my freedom. A language is supposed to behave the way I want. That's its very purpose." if True: x = 1 [copy the above line, paste it 999,998 times] x = 1 print x Python runs that and doesn't say anything about by block length; it just behaves the way I want and prints x (after a short p…

I was talking of programming style.

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

#88

Post by irahul »

kamaal wrote: post #86
irahul wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Sorry! I shouldn't have hurt your religion at the first place. In place of spewing this nonsensical shit, you could have quoted me an example of "exponential gains". Out of curiosity, have you actually programmed in Lisp or Haskell? I am not saying you have, I am not saying you haven't; it's just that people who claim "fuck yeah macros - now I am 100x more productive" are mostly people who haven't actually used the…

Well I should have learned long back to not argue with impolite people. This is one lesson I'm not going to forget.

> Well I should have learned long back to not argue with impolite people.

Sheesh. In this thread, there is nothing but platitude in your posts, and you are constantly trying to put down people(everyone else who doesn't agree with you about perl is a troll, saying that what you know about python is not correct is me defending my religion etc etc), and then you whine about people being impolite. Pot, meet kettle.

> This is one lesson I'm not going to forget.

Another lesson would be to actually learn and use Lisp before claiming exponential gains.

It's not impolite to say you are regurgitating blogosphere bullshit when you claim with utmost confidence "I am sorry to ruin your party but there are languages like lisp and haskell which results in exponential gains" when actually you haven't used either one of them.

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

#89

Post by irahul »

chromatic wrote: post #11
densh wrote: post #5

I'm a python programmer and this article really makes me interested in Perl. The only problem is that Perl 6 haven't shipped yet in more then 4 years since this article was written, have it?

Ignore the semantic games other responses play. If you're asking "Has anyone released an implementation of Perl 6 that's suitable for everyday use by someone who isn't interested in developing Perl 6 itself?", the answer is no.

I asked the same question about a year and half ago.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1808568

At that time, you weren't so "perl 6 is not ready" camp. What changed?

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

#90

Post by sateesh »

kamaal wrote: post #55
read_wharf wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Although Python is taking more of these roles over time, Perl is still the thing that holds much of the internet's infrastructure and tools together, as well as internal servers, so it's a good thing to know if you're interested in all that.

Hmmm, Python has some great frameworks and is a great language. But unfortunately, its almost like going backwards. Perl was invented because C + Unix text processing utilities together were not proving to be good for many tasks like Text processing, fast prototyping etc. Now using another C based language which doesn't do that, takes us back to the old problem again. IMO, Python doesn't solve those problems. Regex s…

What you consider as verbosity in Python might the 'being explicit' philosophy of Python. For example though the succinctness of crafting a Perl regular expression is alluring , I have found writing regular expression the Python way and referring the results in an explicit manner helpful in keeping the code readable.

The gain you mention (though the exponential part is debatable) is not limited to Perl alone[1]. Scripting languages provide a substantial gain in developer productivity freeing them from things like typing, faster debug cycle etc. and that gain is not limited to using Perl alone.

Check Table 1. in the reference I have mentioned, which compares the time it took to develop the same application in Tcl with time it took for development using in C/C++/Java. I think similar gain can be seen when one uses other scripting languages (say Python or Perl).

1. www.stanford.edu/~ouster/cgi-bin/papers/scripting.pdf

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