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Half My Life with Perl

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Re: Half My Life with Perl

#31

Post by jjav »

kamaal wrote: post #2

Perl is one of those power tools(as recommended in Let Over Lambda, together with vim and Lisp), if you learn it well enough to be good at it, and early enough in your career- You really have a mad productivity work horse. Its really one of those things which save tons of time and effort. A bit like O(1) hack of the productivity world. Perhaps at the core of this just how many what we called regular programming tasks…

> You really have a mad productivity work horse.

I'm not aware of anything that can be as effective at text processing as perl. While I don't do much perl anymore, if I have to wrangle text files in all kinds of ways, there is no comparison, perl rules.

Re: Half My Life with Perl

#32

Post by jjav »

dismalaf wrote: post #8
kamaal wrote: post #2

Perl is one of those power tools(as recommended in Let Over Lambda, together with vim and Lisp), if you learn it well enough to be good at it, and early enough in your career- You really have a mad productivity work horse. Its really one of those things which save tons of time and effort. A bit like O(1) hack of the productivity world. Perhaps at the core of this just how many what we called regular programming tasks…

Just curious, what does Perl give you over Ruby if anything? I learned Ruby first, always heard it was strongly inspired by Perl (as well as Smalltalk), and it provides all the benefits you mentioned, I think.

I looove ruby. It is my favorite scripting language for nearly everything.

Text processing though? Nope. perl is immensely better at that. And of course in unix text processing is life.

Re: Half My Life with Perl

#33

Post by throwaway2037 »

canvascritic wrote: post #9
kamaal wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Node/NPM definitely is on-par with CPAN. But pip isn't even close. The real deal with Perl is you not only get bleeding stuff, you get all kind of obscure and rare libraries. Its not that you can't do that in Python. Its just that the culture in Python world isn't made up of people who think about those problems or even in that dimension. Its a great language for writing all variety of apps. Perl is the og hacker's l…

I'll be frank: I think this idea that ${faveLang} is for misunderstood geniuses who truly understand computers where mainstream languages like Python are for dunces who only know how to glue together APIs is a large part of why such languages as Perl are nearing extinction. It turns out that there are people working on challenging problems in domains you've never heard of in Python -- and pretty much every other lang…

    > beware that smug elitism turns people off
I don't know what caused this reaction. Was the OP being smug or elite? I did not read it that way. If anything, in my experience, C++ and Rust folks are way more smug/elite compared to Perl hackers.

In my experience, the biggest problem with Perl is readability. Python crushes it. Without list comprehension, it is also very slow during for loops. But, no worries: Most people writing Python don't care too much about speed, or they are using C libraries, like NumPy or Pandas or SciPy. I write this as someone who wrote Perl for years, personally and professionally. Later in my career, I came into Python, and realised it was so much easier to read and maintain large code bases, compared to Perl. To be fair, much like C, it is possible to write very clear Perl, but people quickly get carried away, using insane syntax. With Python, the whole culture, from the bottom up, is about readability, simplicity, and accessibility. I think my only "gripe" about Python is there are no references like Perl, but you can fake it with single-item-lists.

Re: Half My Life with Perl

#34

Post by throwaway2037 »

cjbgkagh wrote: post #18
canvascritic wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'll be frank: I think this idea that ${faveLang} is for misunderstood geniuses who truly understand computers where mainstream languages like Python are for dunces who only know how to glue together APIs is a large part of why such languages as Perl are nearing extinction. It turns out that there are people working on challenging problems in domains you've never heard of in Python -- and pretty much every other lang…

I wonder how much of catering to the lowest common denominator / being a team player is an internalizing of corporatisms reduction of the worker to a fungible interchangeable cog. As a solo dev it is a massive advantage to use sophisticated languages and tools without worrying if the dumbest person on my team can use them. It’s a strategic advantage and I run rings around far larger companies.

    > reduction of the worker to a fungible interchangeable cog
I see this trope a lot on HN, and I don't understand it. All of the highest skilled developers that I have met are the quickest to adapt to new projects or technologies. To me, they look like a "fungible interchangeable cog".

And every solo dev that I ever met thinks they are God's gift to the world -- "tech geniuses". Most of them are just working on their own Big Ball o' Mud, just like the rest of us working on a team.

Re: Half My Life with Perl

#35

Post by wruza »

wodenokoto wrote: post #10

I’m about to turn 40 and have been thinking if I should learn Perl or AWK or go with a “modern” solution for text wrangling on the command line. The general advice here seems to be “learn Perl while young”

Perl was 1 line vs. 100 lines in everything else, in text processing. Now it is 1 line vs. 2-3 lines that are clearer and have stricter semantics. It also has support for running oneliners straight from cli. You probably don’t want to learn it today, as it won’t make that big of a difference.

Re: Half My Life with Perl

#36

Post by RodgerTheGreat »

wodenokoto wrote: post #10

I’m about to turn 40 and have been thinking if I should learn Perl or AWK or go with a “modern” solution for text wrangling on the command line. The general advice here seems to be “learn Perl while young”

Learn AWK. It's tremendously simpler than Perl, and even more omnipresent. In a week or two of study and tinkering you'll be an expert.

Re: Half My Life with Perl

#37

Post by tolciho »

dismalaf wrote: post #8
kamaal wrote: post #2

Perl is one of those power tools(as recommended in Let Over Lambda, together with vim and Lisp), if you learn it well enough to be good at it, and early enough in your career- You really have a mad productivity work horse. Its really one of those things which save tons of time and effort. A bit like O(1) hack of the productivity world. Perhaps at the core of this just how many what we called regular programming tasks…

Just curious, what does Perl give you over Ruby if anything? I learned Ruby first, always heard it was strongly inspired by Perl (as well as Smalltalk), and it provides all the benefits you mentioned, I think.

One liners. I dropped ruby when it could not express various one liners as well as perl can.

Re: Half My Life with Perl

#38

Post by wruza »

Tbh, for me it was a source of regex knowledge, in retrospect. Remove regexes from perl, what’s left?

I can name: dynamic scoping, implicit filehandles, implicit $_, strange contexts, keyword-like list functions. That’s basically it, and while it sounds fun, it doesn’t do much in a sense of code reduction.

$. $? $$ etc, well you can split lines with .split('\n'), get status as a part of result, call os.getpid().

, you can open() or createReadStream().

$_ is just a kids toy. “print if /…/“. Cool.

Lots of global modes under dynamic scoping is questionable. Value semantics and corresponding sigils are horrible, really. Bless is ugh. Subs are meh.

It’s all just regex. Add regex as a language construct and you get the power of perl in it. /…/.test(s), s.match(/…/), s.replace(/…/, '$&') that’s 90% of Perl. Regex saves most lines of code, everything else is just esoteric extra that doesn’t do much. Also no GC.

Re: Half My Life with Perl

#39

Post by BoingBoomTschak »

liontwist wrote: post #6
kamaal wrote: post #2

Perl is one of those power tools(as recommended in Let Over Lambda, together with vim and Lisp), if you learn it well enough to be good at it, and early enough in your career- You really have a mad productivity work horse. Its really one of those things which save tons of time and effort. A bit like O(1) hack of the productivity world. Perhaps at the core of this just how many what we called regular programming tasks…

I’m into lisp and vim. I did one small project with Perl but wasn’t excited. I was hoping for bash 2.0 but the shell integration wasn’t great. Seems like python is a similar feature set, less exotic, and has great libraries. Anyway? What did I miss? anything I should take a second look at?

You should really look at Tcl if coming from Lisp and wanting a bash successor. Tcl (8.5) is also preinstalled on MacOS.

Re: Half My Life with Perl

#40

Post by znpy »

temporallobe wrote: post #17

Perl is my first love, and I still whip it out from time to time to do system tasks (anything in the linux world). It is literally installed on any *nix OS, macOS included. Python is fine, but it’s not as universal as Perl. I also feel like Perl is more “batteries included” as many times I can be productive without “use”ing any libraries. It’s has been my secret weapon over the years. I’ve also noticed that most youn…

My experience with Perl is that often the batteries are rotting.

Not a strong opinion though, i haven’t been writing perl in a while.

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