11–20 of 196 posts
Reliability? Sure. Readability? Not so much.
It's not that I think perl will be significantly (or at all) nicer, but I think the readability difference is often overstated and I'd like to test that thought.
Combine its shorthand and with the fact that it's already getting hard to find Perl people, and we could see some dedicated Perl warriors doing very, very well in the coming years.
I remain unconvinced. Should the amount of effort that it costs to update the interpreter really be the main consideration?
> I remain unconvinced. Should the amount of effort that it costs to update the interpreter really be the main consideration? No, it shouldnt. But it's a proxy measure for the engineering and productisation effort which goes in. It's relatively easy to get features in quickly with breakage. It's easy to have stability with no change. It's relatively hard to continuously improve with good reliability and back-compat.…
I remain unconvinced. Should the amount of effort that it costs to update the interpreter really be the main consideration?
It's not that the the ability to upgrade the interpreter, and several hundred dependencies, and have several tens of thousands of lines of production work easily is good (although it would be tough to argue that it's bad :-)
It's what being able to do that successfully says about the reliability of the perl ecosystem as a whole.
The investment the perl community has made over the last ten years in building the best testing infrastructure of any language (seriously - it's damn excellent), and fostering a community that's values stuff working has paid off in spades.
My experiences match chromatic's in that it just fracking works.
Good article with some good points. But it did get me thinking, is Perl getting ready to be in a prime position to become the next Cobol? Probability will go up considerably if Perl 6 never comes out to shake up the ecosystem, but even if it does come, what's to say that there won't be Perl 5 applications running into the next century? Combine its shorthand and with the fact that it's already getting hard to find Per…
Perl is like C++ for the Web. Bulletproof. Unless you intentionally remove the kevlar plates. But then it's on you ;)
I heard some else say Perl is COBOL of the web. (COBOL is also used by banks for it's reliability)
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I remain unconvinced. Should the amount of effort that it costs to update the interpreter really be the main consideration? No, it shouldnt. But it's a proxy measure for the engineering and productisation effort which goes in. It's relatively easy to get features in quickly with breakage. It's easy to have stability with no change. It's relatively hard to continuously improve with good reliability and back-compat.…
I thought implicit deref of references was coming in 5.16 or 5.18, at least in cases where it was unambiguous?
Reliability? Sure. Readability? Not so much.
Reliability? Sure. Readability? Not so much.