If some old soul is up for it, Exercism Perl track could use improvements in concepts.
We were wizards – a foreword to Learning Perl (1993)
81–90 of 130 posts
Re: We were wizards – a foreword to Learning Perl (1993)
#82About 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…
Not to mention Write-Only nature of Perl is a nice added job security.
This is grossly exaggerated. Yes, sometimes Perl looks like line noise to the uninitiated, but to the seasoned Perl programmer, it looks like checksummed line noise.
Re: We were wizards – a foreword to Learning Perl (1993)
#83Earlier quoted context omitted.
> We were indeed, and sadly like many true wizards - we were grumpy and too smart and too weird for the world. The submitted post exemplifies the worst characteristics of what we can call coding culture . Larry Wall was a polarising character. He could be witty but also tiresome. The C and C++ coding cultures have had their problems too. Python has been successful as a language and as a coding culture. I don't like t…
>> Python has its own TIMTOWDI at this point. It's Python's dependency management, and there is more than one way to do it: pip, pipenv, poetry, conda, setuptools, hatch, micropipenv, PDM, pip-tools, egg, ActiveState platform, homebrew, or your operating system's package manager. Relevant xkcd: https://xkcd.com/1987/
python packaging is nearing "there's no way to do it right"
Re: We were wizards – a foreword to Learning Perl (1993)
#84Earlier quoted context omitted.
I wonder, is Perl more ubiquitous than Python for these cases?
Perl gets installed wherever `git` CLI is available, generally. I'd say it's more ubiquitous. And it doesn't suffer from the python2/3 split.
That split was terrible and it took over a decade to fully resolve, but it's behind us now.
Re: We were wizards – a foreword to Learning Perl (1993)
#85Earlier quoted context omitted.
> We were indeed, and sadly like many true wizards - we were grumpy and too smart and too weird for the world. The submitted post exemplifies the worst characteristics of what we can call coding culture . Larry Wall was a polarising character. He could be witty but also tiresome. The C and C++ coding cultures have had their problems too. Python has been successful as a language and as a coding culture. I don't like t…
> Larry Wall was a polarising character. He could be witty but also tiresome. To whom? Unless you were working on the Perl language itself, there was no need to interact with him.
I offered to help out with the Perl 6 logo, as I had both experience writing Perl as a career and having gone to art and design school - while also running a printing studio of my own.
I joined the Perl6 dev mailing lists, listened in on them, offered my support, gave a broad stroke on design ideas, backed them up with reasonable arguments and asked for comments. Larry chimed in basically saying, "no, because this sucks" and not too long later the Camelia butterfly[0] thing was born.
So yeah, I bounced.
Larry may be brilliant, but maybe he also has a history of not knowing when to delegate tasks (and trust). And now Perl WAS something, rather than IS something.
Re: We were wizards – a foreword to Learning Perl (1993)
#86Earlier quoted context omitted.
Perl has a weird way of letting you go from thought to code, and disappearing in between, unlike any other language I've ever used. You really can go from idea to functioning system as fast as you type without a lot of pre-planning. It's hard to describe, and the style has fallen out of fashion for more formal, easier to share between humans languages like Java or python, which feel like they introduce an inherent fr…
I love this subthread; I've tried to explain this for years and I've concluded it's simply impossible to convey to someone who never experienced it. It's sad, and really frustrating, to just hear the same clueless comments and memes repeated. So I'm glad to see there are still people around who know what it was like to work with a truly expressive language. About 15 years ago I was put on a Java project that ran for…
LOL are you me? This is exactly what happened to me! Same situation, Java with an external team, project over budget and over time, gets canned and then a few weeks with Perl and it’s done
Re: We were wizards – a foreword to Learning Perl (1993)
#87We were indeed, and sadly like many true wizards - we were grumpy and too smart and too weird for the world. And we had too many sigyls and weird symbols and we didn’t see farther than our nose, so we weren’t that good with foretelling things, but only with practical magic. Even though wizards foretold nPm by inventing CJAN - like Cpan for JavaScript. And also IO::Async and Lehman’s work was very much ahead of NodeJS…
POE (2001!) was another async-ahead-of-its-time: https://www.perl.com/pub/2001/01/poe.html/ https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perl_Object_Environment
the perl community has a way to create cute abstraction that still makes sense ..
Re: We were wizards – a foreword to Learning Perl (1993)
#88Perl 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.
Right there with you. No language even comes close to Perl’s regex support. First class support for regexes as programming tools, and unparalleled speed.
I attended Sun’s road show announcing Java to the world in 1996 (IIRC) and when I asked about regular expression support, I was shocked that it not only didn’t have it built into the language syntax, it wasn’t even available in the library.
As a die-hard Perl fan, that seemed a ridiculous oversight for a language being promoted for Internet programming.
Re: We were wizards – a foreword to Learning Perl (1993)
#89If some old soul is up for it, Exercism Perl track could use improvements in concepts.
Worth noting that Exercism is (or at least was at the beginning of the year) experiencing a bit of a funding problem. It would be a remarkable shame if it were to go away, or be less accessible. Such a great resource.
Re: We were wizards – a foreword to Learning Perl (1993)
#90Earlier quoted context omitted.
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?
Last year I finished over a decade on very large Perl project, collaborating within a team. When I joined that project it was already over a decade old a most of the code was much like what you are probably imagining. When I left the project, all the parts we had touched were much like any other high quality modern codebase, and we could almost as readily maintain the decade-old parts (that we had worked on) as the week-old parts.
Having worked in many languages over many decades, I've learned that a high quality codebase is built by high quality developers, largely independent of the languages they use. You can build an unmaintainable mess in any language as easily as you can build a high quality codebase in Perl. I would concede that you can more easily build an unmaintainable mess in Perl than in many languages but that's up to you; you can do most things more easily in Perl than in many languages ;)