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Half My Life with Perl

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Re: Half My Life with Perl

#51

Post by wruza »

wodenokoto wrote: post #42
wruza wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

What's the 2-3 line alternative to perl you are referring to? I find piping into python to be a lot more than 2-3 lines before I'm even ready to do any manipulation of input, which again can get quite verbose. So I'm guessing it is not python.

I meant average line ratio, not literal one-liners, apologies for confusion.

Re: Half My Life with Perl

#52

Post by michaelt »

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”

> The general advice here seems to be “learn Perl while young”

I think what people are actually saying is: "Perl was great in certain regards, back when I could expect my colleagues to understand Perl, which incidentally was when I was young"

It may take many more likes to apply a regex in any other language - but if my colleagues know Python but not Perl, saving 10 minutes of coding will cost me 5 hours of training/coaching/debugging after the code has been 'maintained' by someone who doesn't know their $_ from their ->@*

Re: Half My Life with Perl

#53

Post by doublerabbit »

ykonstant wrote: post #45
znpy wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Can you give a specific example?

I can't recall what modules my boss created but he had heart attack and passed away. So his modules are now left unmaintained.

Fortunately, new version realises of perl don't break CPAN modules that much. But there have been a decrease and of programmers that have either moved on or are passing away.

Without a younger audience not to maintain they're left to rot. Python will encounter the same when a new language hits the block in years to come.

Re: Half My Life with Perl

#54

Post by warpspin »

kamaal wrote: post #5
alfiedotwtf wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sadly I think Node and Python have long taken over CPAN. But apart from that, I was nodding through your whole comment… Perl really is a super power. POSIX at your fingertips!

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…

> Node/NPM definitely is on-par with CPAN. But pip isn't even close.

I'll say this as someone who still does more than 80% of his backend work in Perl: This is not true. I wish it was.

CPAN was awesome once. Now it's mainly old. Yes, you will find obscure things which you won't find for Python. At same time, anything interfacing with modern stuff is often only 40% done in CPAN or not at all compared to the Python, PHP or JavaScript eco system. Not talking about data science stuff here, where Python gained a huge lead - simply have a look at how much support you get nowadays in CPAN for interfacing with, for example, current web api versions or interfacing with third party files like docx, pdf, excel, odt. If there's support for things at all, it is so far far far behind to what libs in other ecosystems have to offer, most of the time.

It simply shows that the crowd implementing business applications went elsewhere, so anything in that area seems stuck in the 2000 to 2010s in CPAN.

Re: Half My Life with Perl

#55

Post by doublerabbit »

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…

MSN Messenger contact bots got me in to perl back at 15, 35 now and still coding it for work as a legacy maintainer. Pays well.

Re: Half My Life with Perl

#56

Post by michaelt »

throwaway2037 wrote: post #33
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…

> 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 peop…

> I don't know what caused this reaction.

Probably the lines "Its just that the culture in Python world isn't made up of people who think about those problems or even in that dimension."

and "Most of the bad rep Perl gets is because programmers who only interact with http endpoints and databases tend to not understand where else it could be useful."

Re: Half My Life with Perl

#57

Post by kamaal »

stouset wrote: post #21
kamaal wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>>In the real world, the ability of a lone genius to cobble together a script in an hour is actually not that much of an edge Any macro/multiplier is that way. You don't miss it, until some one shows you how to do it. In the last six months alone the scenarios where I had to call upon Perl to help slam dunk a thing insanely laborious are dozens in number. Its just that if you don't know this, or don't know it exists,…

The superpower here is a scripting language, not Perl specifically.

Sometimes a language/tool gets to evolve with the operating system right at their birth. The relationship with between Unix, vim, and Perl is that way.

This is a unique combination, which I don't think will ever change. Unless of course we move away from Unixy operating systems to something entire new.

Re: Half My Life with Perl

#58

Post by shakna »

jsnell wrote: post #41
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”

What's the modern solution to text processing on the command line? I don't think anyone tried seriously addressing that use case after Perl. Like, obviously you can do text processing in any language, but you're not going to be doing it in the context of shell pipelines and one-liners. The preferred interaction modes are totally different.

I've been disappointed to see a massive uptick in people writing a whole Python subprocess script instead of just an awk column select. They usually know awk, but Python is more familiar so they replace ten characters with a couple hundred.

It seems like fewer even want to learn a shell pipeline.

Re: Half My Life with Perl

#59

Post by [deleted] »

akoboldfrying wrote: post #50
wruza wrote: post #38

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(). , yo…

I use Perl for one-liners all the time -- nothing can top it there. But when the task at hand grows just slightly bigger, to the point where I know I'll need to pass filehandles to/from my own functions, my skin starts to literally itch because of how bad the filehandle situation is. It's not plain "open F, ..." any more... Is it "*F"? Is it "\*F"? Are those the same thing? (What the hell is a "typeglob"?) Wait, can'…

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