41–50 of 130 posts
[1] https://hackaday.com/2024/01/09/floss-weekly-episode-765-tha...
About 5-6 years ago I found a new niche for Perl in my day-to-day work. I did a lot of shell scripting at the time and was constantly getting annoyed by subtle differences between macOS and Linux. Sed is especially difficult, because the flags in BSD version and GNU version for in-place search and replace do not match. Plus, sed regexes are more primitive compared to most other languages. I decided to switch from sed…
About 5-6 years ago I found a new niche for Perl in my day-to-day work. I did a lot of shell scripting at the time and was constantly getting annoyed by subtle differences between macOS and Linux. Sed is especially difficult, because the flags in BSD version and GNU version for in-place search and replace do not match. Plus, sed regexes are more primitive compared to most other languages. I decided to switch from sed…
I wonder, is Perl more ubiquitous than Python for these cases?
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I'm bashing Perl because I'm using it daily today . I have the moral right. People waxing poetic about their time using Perl back in the late 1990s/early 2000s don't have a vote because they clung onto good bits and have long forgotten the ugly. > it really makes Stream-of-Conscious programming the norm Are you sure it's a Good Thing? Really sure? What if you have teammates? What if you have a life? What if you need…
I still use Perl, maybe not daily but yes to weekly, so I have still have skin in the game. Yes I'm sure.
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Stream of consciousness programming?
I associate this with what we used to call "one-liner programming": I would write a single line of Perl code (in bash, prefixed with `perl -Mwarnings -MDebug -E' '`, convince myself the code did what we needed, and then share it around as a paste in irc / chat / whatever. It was amazing what you could achieve with the right modules, and Perl's flexibility allowed your mind to roam freely. Incidentally, the fact that…
While Python is my preferred language for most tasks, I still use perl as an ad hoc stream processor with `perl -pe` and nothing really beats it at the task. Anything more than 10 lines and I find python easier to deal with (or at least it's my comfort zone).
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I still use Perl, maybe not daily but yes to weekly, so I have still have skin in the game. Yes I'm sure.
Do you develop with Perl collaboratively with teammates?
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For anyone who cares, sed -i'' should be compatible on both mac and linux.
It is not. -i'' is exactly the same thing as "-i", and while GNU sed interprets this as an empty suffix, BSD sed expects -i to take an argument normally, and will treat the next argument as the extension. If you instead use sed -i "", as is appropriate with a BSD sed, GNU sed will interpret that as the empty program and try to read from a file named your actual script.
I liked Perl for text parsing and that kind of work.. Used it professionally for about 3 years. Two things i didn't like about it which i still don't 1. It's a conceptually huge language. There are several things to learn to be effective or you fall into the problem when the 10% that you use is different from the 10% that your teammates use. I found python attractive because of this. 2. I disliked Walls book. It was…
As for the Camel book, what I liked about it is that it explains why Perl is the way it is... the underlying philosophy. Once you know that, it starts making a lot more sense. You usually didn't get that with books like "Learn Perl in 21 days" or something.
For all of Perl’s shortcomings, I’ve always felt that no other language came with Larry and Randall’s sense that programming was fun. The Perl folks always understood that our skills were rare, and the powers they conferred were inherently magic - even if a bit dorky.
Perl was one of the first languages I learned and also the first language I used commercially. I have a huge soft spot for it as a language. Still love Perl regular expressions like no other. I loved the camel book and its various footnotes with both humour and deeper knowledge on a topic.
No language even comes close to Perl’s regex support. First class support for regexes as programming tools, and unparalleled speed.