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Perl is 25 years old today

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Re: Perl is 25 years old today

#71

Post by btilly »

mahmud wrote: post #29
VLM wrote: post #21

I've found over the past decade or so that when I write a "perl" program I'm really writing about five lines of glue code around multiple CPAN packages. Well maybe more than 5 lines for control flow, some business-logic error handling, etc. When I write in another language I spend a long time looking for a library like the ten I'd find in CPAN, sometimes I find one but often enough not, then a long time complaining a…

CPAN might be centralized, but Java libraries are far superior. This is not a pissing contest, but a fact. The java runtime makes everything else look amateurish and unprepared. Debugging, profiling, introspection and distribution, all built into the platform. Attach to any running process and analyze away. Perl is good when it works, but when it doesn't, it's cryptic stack traces and `exit -1`, nothing meaningful.

Counter point.

When I was at Google, the opinion among some of the SREs I knew was that Java there was better than elsewhere so you actually did get reasonable debugging stack traces, but the C++ libraries there were still significantly easier to debug problems in than the Java ones.

Yes, I know that those AbstractFactoryFactories let you produce convenient higher order abstractions, but when things go pear shaped, they can make it really hard to figure out what was supposed to be happening, let alone where it went wrong.

Re: Perl is 25 years old today

#72

Post by lloeki »

kyrra wrote: post #63
FigBug wrote: post #44

Perl is 25. Python is 21. Lua is 19. Ruby is 17. Interesting how I consider Perl an 'old' language, and the others new languages. I guess it says more about how revolutionary Perl was at the time and how quickly it became widespread. The only other language I know of that went from 0 to everywhere in under 5 years was Javascript.

Made me look up the timeline of when languages were released: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_programming_languag... Pascal is 42, C is 40. Lots of fun info on that page.

I don't know where you can find widespread Pascal, but Fortran is 55 and is still actively used and distributed in NumPy.

Re: Perl is 25 years old today

#73

Post by jbooth »

jrockway wrote: post #58
mahmud wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

CPAN might be centralized, but Java libraries are far superior. This is not a pissing contest, but a fact. The java runtime makes everything else look amateurish and unprepared. Debugging, profiling, introspection and distribution, all built into the platform. Attach to any running process and analyze away. Perl is good when it works, but when it doesn't, it's cryptic stack traces and `exit -1`, nothing meaningful.

Not really true. Yesterday I was trying to debug resource-loading issues. In any normal programming language, you can just strace it and you'll see where the program is doing I/O and you can figure out where it's trying to load files from. But if everything is in a jar, you don't see any OS-level I/O happening when Java tries to load something, so you have to invent all-new tools just to figure things out. When you s…

I agree but if we're comparing Java to Perl, type erasure is only slightly hacky compared to the whole 'bless' thing.

Funnily enough, they're both examples of the same problem, stitching new features onto a language that was not at all prepared for them.

Re: Perl is 25 years old today

#75

Post by ChuckMcM »

I've got an interesting relationship with perl. My first exposure was back in the 80's when I was at Sun and perl was, to my taste, a shell scripting language with the complexity of APL and the readability of Forth. I hated it.

When I took the job at Blekko they said "We do most of our stuff in perl" and I was dubious about that.

However, now that I've been exposed to V5 for a couple of years and have probably written a few thousand lines of code in it, I find its easier to write a quick hack in than Python, and it certainly has a better 'command line' feel than Java. But it wasn't until I started coding up a quick CMS type gizmo for making HTML pages that I truly "got" the power of CPAN backing it up. There is a lot of stuff there. Folks like me who gave up on the language in the V3/V4 days as "hopelessly hacky" should re-visit it.

Re: Perl is 25 years old today

#76

Post by kyrra »

lloeki wrote: post #72
kyrra wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Made me look up the timeline of when languages were released: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_programming_languag... Pascal is 42, C is 40. Lots of fun info on that page.

I don't know where you can find widespread Pascal, but Fortran is 55 and is still actively used and distributed in NumPy.

Ya, I have no clue either. Pascal was the first language I was originally taught (though I had been messing with QuickBasic for a few years before that). Pascal seemed to have died out in the late 90's.

Re: Perl is 25 years old today

#77

Post by peteretep »

adrianhoward wrote: post #28

Work stuff is mostly Ruby, Python and PHP. Entertainment is Clojure (mmmmm.... Lispy goodness) and Haskell ATM. But for my own stuff I still reach for Perl. Best testing infrastructure on the planet and that, in combination with CPAN, lets me get shit done.

I interviewed you once ... approximately forever ago ... and you told me at the time you were just switching to using Ruby for fun stuff, while using Perl for work. I'm glad you switched back, and appreciate your excellent CPAN modules!

Re: Perl is 25 years old today

#80

Post by draegtun »

indubitably wrote: post #74

And Perl 6 is 24

Considering perl5 is only 18 years old then somethings gone very awry there :)

Perl6 is looking quite fresh considering how old you think it is. I just submitted an article I'd seen to HN which shows how a formula like...

  4.7kΩ ± 5%
... can be parsed inline with Perl6 code.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4939204

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