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We were wizards – a foreword to Learning Perl (1993)

jwgoerlich.com

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Re: We were wizards – a foreword to Learning Perl (1993)

#91

Post by cushychicken »

macintux wrote: post #88
cushychicken wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

not only didn’t have it built into the language syntax, it wasn’t even available in the library.

Did not know that about the first Java release. That shit is bananas.

Re: We were wizards – a foreword to Learning Perl (1993)

#92

Post by bitwize »

cushychicken wrote: post #49

Perl was the first programming language I worked with at a real, paying job. I don’t miss that job, but it did teach me a lot about how to deliver value quickly (Perl is still better at smashing 400 million lines of text than most other languages), and some of the impediments to that (Perl’s “write only” syntactic approach). For all of Perl’s shortcomings, I’ve always felt that no other language came with Larry and R…

Now thanks to Devin, anyone can have that skill!

Re: We were wizards – a foreword to Learning Perl (1993)

#93

Post by bitwize »

bane wrote: post #4
getcrunk wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Stream of consciousness programming?

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…

> 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.

Funny, a lot of people say that about Lisp...

Re: We were wizards – a foreword to Learning Perl (1993)

#94

Post by rabbiveesh »

WesolyKubeczek wrote: post #39
alfiedotwtf wrote: post #2

Bashing Perl is now a meme, but I can never get over what could have been… Python 3000 and Perl 6 had the community all abuzz. CPAN was the amazing Wild West where people were sharing amazing libraries in such a simple way compared to how every other language was still using the likes of Source Forge and possibly even Fresh Meat (GitHub didn’t exist yet). Don’t fall into the meme trap of hating on Perl. Although it’s…

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'm currently writing perl with a team, and I find that so long as you write in a way that looks good, there's no issue with other people reading the code either.

And that still happens at stream-of-conciousness.

Re: We were wizards – a foreword to Learning Perl (1993)

#96

Post by galdosdi »

andrewl-hn wrote: post #8

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 picked up the same habit years ago in my first job because we worked with a mix of all the UNIXes (AIX, HPUX, Solaris, etc). Always "perl -pe" instead of "sed" and man oh man you're right perl is amazing for that, its original task

The trend then was towards standardization towards linux, but then that got compromised as that's when macbooks got popular with developers.

Re: We were wizards – a foreword to Learning Perl (1993)

#97

Post by andrewl-hn »

diarrhea wrote: post #42
andrewl-hn wrote: post #8

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?

It is! Modern macOS, fresh install: no Python, no Ruby, but Perl is there. Git for Windows adds Bash with Perl in it. Every linux server has it. You probably can come up with some Docker image that doesn't have it installed, but it comes in as a dependency to a lot of linux software.

The cool thing is that Perl is compatible, and maintaining compatibility is the top priority for Perl developers. so, many distros keep updating it because it's very safe to do so. When many projects switched from GPL2 to GPL3 macOS famously decided to either freeze some bundled tools, switch to alternatives or removed them entirely. It took them years and years, but all this time Perl has been a notable exception.

As a result nowadays you can be very certain that every machine you run your code on has a very recent Perl installed, so you can use many new stuff, too. It's an old language, but the code you can write can be pretty modern, which is nice.

It's still Perl: lots of symbols, some variables get set up implicitly for you, some keywords look silly to modern eyes (`my` to declare a variable, `sub` declares a function). Some newish stuff is handy. Like, these days you can specify types of parameters in function signatures, and it does a rudimentary type-checking for you. And Perl regexes are still better than in ANY language out there, for 35 years and counting!

Re: We were wizards – a foreword to Learning Perl (1993)

#98

Post by darrenf »

andrewl-hn wrote: post #97
diarrhea wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder, is Perl more ubiquitous than Python for these cases?

It is! Modern macOS, fresh install: no Python, no Ruby, but Perl is there. Git for Windows adds Bash with Perl in it. Every linux server has it. You probably can come up with some Docker image that doesn't have it installed, but it comes in as a dependency to a lot of linux software. The cool thing is that Perl is compatible, and maintaining compatibility is the top priority for Perl developers. so, many distros keep…

> It took them years and years, but all this time Perl has been a notable exception.

If we take Apple at their word then it's an exception only in that they haven't got round to it yet, not that it isn't also going to be culled -- the Catalina release notes mentioned Perl explicitly alongside the other two:

    Scripting language runtimes such as Python, Ruby, and Perl are included in macOS for
    compatibility with legacy software. Future versions of macOS won’t include scripting
    language runtimes by default, ...
-- https://developer.apple.com/documentation/macos-release-note...

Re: We were wizards – a foreword to Learning Perl (1993)

#99

Post by abecedarius »

heresie-dabord wrote: post #55
larodi wrote: post #14

We 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…

> 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…

But I feel like Python is too complex and big to really like now. It was my go-to language in the 2000s as a kind of sweet spot: featureful/library-rich enough for getting things done, but not overgrown with decades of individually-worthwhile complications.

(Not saying it was ever my paradigm for elegant language design or that it's their job to conform to my taste.)

Re: We were wizards – a foreword to Learning Perl (1993)

#100

Post by abecedarius »

retrobox wrote: post #23

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.

The Perl Journal had that flavor too. I hardly ever read it because I had no interest in actually coding Perl, but it was great to see this kind of culture on the magazine rack at Borders or wherever.
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