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Half My Life with Perl

perladvent.org

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Re: Half My Life with Perl

#71

Post by cjbgkagh »

throwaway2037 wrote: post #34
cjbgkagh wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

If only the highest skill devs could quickly learn new projects then they are no longer interchangeable.

Your sampling of solo devs could very well be biased, similarly so could my sampling. Not working on a big ball of mud is a massive perk of being solo dev. It’s my company and I’ll refactor if I want to.

Re: Half My Life with Perl

#72

Post by cjbgkagh »

canvascritic wrote: post #29
cjbgkagh wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I agree with you that it is sad there isn't more diversity in languages and tools, and that generally organizations are using the same terrible slop. We could have such nice things You lose me with the smugness. Make no mistake, you aren't smarter or better than someone else purely by virtue of your willingness to hack on BEAM languages or smlnj or Racket or whatever languages you like. There are probably people smar…

That sounds like post facto rationalization, sour grapes, and perhaps a bit of learned helplessness. To paraphrase you ‘We can’t have nice things because nice things are in reality bad and unrealistic. People who do have nice things are not special.’

I could readily believe that your stated reality is true of the majority of solo devs, but it’s not true for me or those that I know. I understand that my sampling is biased and probably not the normal experience. I don’t seek to show off for my anonymous HN account and instead wanted to say that sometimes we can have nice things and it can work out successfully.

Re: Half My Life with Perl

#74

Post by pif »

oniony wrote: post #66

My first experience with Perl was back in 1999. I was fresh out of university working at a dot-com start-up web agency and was asked to take ownership of a project after the developer had left the company. It was pretty straightforward CGI project, with some functions that aligned one-to-one with the database tables. Quite clean code. I made the changes I needed to make easily enough for the first couple of bug fixes…

> It was both genius and horrifying.

No, it was just stupid and horrifying. Something like `set_db("customer", "name")` would have yielded the same functionality with no obfuscation.

Re: Half My Life with Perl

#76

Post by wodenokoto »

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.

That was bad phrasing on my part, I meant "Is there a modern alternative I should go with instead?" - I also don't know what it would be.

But I would love to know if there is a non-regular expression language with native support for csv, json and yaml that one can pipe files in and out of.

Re: Half My Life with Perl

#77

Post by dpb001 »

Back in the 90’s Perl was about the only scripting platform that gave you access to host commands and info as well as the ability to connect to databases running on that host. Part of bringing up a Solaris host for Oracle always started with a visit to sunfreeware.com to get a version of Perl compatible with the latest DBI/DBD and enhanced email CPAN modules. I abused the backtick feature heavily.

Re: Half My Life with Perl

#78

Post by mst »

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'…

Plain perl:

  open my $fh, '
Nicer:

  use File::Open qw(fopen);
  ...
  my $fh = fopen $filename;
(and File::Open is simple pure perl code so if I need to distribute the script to random machines I throw App::FatPacker at it to produce a bundled version)

Re: Half My Life with Perl

#79

Post by creer »

RodgerTheGreat wrote: post #36
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.

Awk is too specialized, specific. Perl is amazing at text processing AND also amazing at much more. The basics of perl for basic awk-like functionality is really not much to learn. Skip awk and learn something more useful.

This works because perl is layered. To do even fairly elaborate awk-like text processing you only need to learn a little perl. Nothing like all of perl. To do the rest (of elaborate text processing), you learn a little more. In the end, most likely you never need to learn all of perl. But it's there to add to your toolbox as needed as you go.

Re: Half My Life with Perl

#80

Post by BiteCode_dev »

replwoacause wrote: post #75

Any good reasons not to build web apps and API backends with Perl these days?

The ecosystem of PHP/Ruby/Python is miles ahead so if you need anything ranging from auth to validation, you will have to do 10 times the work.

In fact, even modern JS frameworks with features that have no equivalent in Laravel/RoR/Django see their appeal diminished because those old school frameworks do the basic so well they are productivity cheat code for essentials.

It's so easy to find people delighting in beautiful hot reload yet struggling for days making Oauth work or having to pay a saas for image resizing while 20 years old tech have that part nailed down.

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