81–90 of 131 posts
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A karma 3 account. Where are the Perl-hating trolls coming from on HN? (I thought Guido said that it was time to stop trolling, so it isn't Python people now?)
I am puzzled why your immediate response is to blame Python.
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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, t…
Unfortunately it looks like the interest in Perl may be fading a little according to Google trends: http://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=perl%2C%20python%2C%2... (Perl vs Python for comparison)
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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.
int i 4;
and the assignment operators being the other way round:
a =+ 2;
The point is, when discussing the age of a language, how important is the degree of change over time? At what point is it a new language? The same is true of human languages. I can understand Shakespeare with little trouble, but I miss some points unless there are footnotes. I can get a bit of Chaucer, but far from full comprehension. Beowulf? Not a prayer. But it's all "English"...
Happy Birthday, Perl :). At Crowdtilt, we are proud to have the majority of our stack Perl based. w00t w00t CPAN :)
I have been working as a programmer for 25 years and started using Perl in 1993 or so. I cannot express what it felt like to have this incredibly powerful tool that seemed to integrate all of the sed, awk, shell, and C code that I had for research. Using Perl absolutely felt like magic, particularly for analyzing text.
I love Python, Ruby, and Lua too, but Perl will always be the tool that quickly gets things up and running.
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.
Common Lisp is 28, which a year younger than C++ and not much older than Perl. So not a dinosaur language as some people think.
Scheme, for example, is a decade older than Common Lisp, but it's still commonly considered a Lisp (no pun intended).
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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, t…
AbstractFactoryFactory nothing--maybe Google's sensible enough not to use frameworks which create bytecode and inject it into running processes, but try to debug something configured via annotations or XML sometime.
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I don't know where you can find widespread Pascal, but Fortran is 55 and is still actively used and distributed in NumPy.
It would be interesting to know if anything older than Fortran 77 is still in active use. I know that there is a lot of F77 still around, but the Fortran code I've seen at NASA is at least up to F90/F95. Someone who learned F95 or later and never wrote fixed format Fortran would be pretty lost if they had to work on F77 or, Backus forbid, F66. C, on the other hand, has changed much less, beyond the ANSI function decl…
People still run production COBOL programs, today, that were written in the 60s and 70s. They may compile it with a version of COBOL that has support for features like object oriented programming. But the programs were written decades ago, and do not use those features.
I know one person who, 10 years ago, went back to work for the same company that she had worked at 30 years prior. Among other things she found a PL/I program that not only was around, but the last commit on was hers. She asked them, "I'm the last person to touch that, and I don't even know that language any more! Why are you still running it?" The answer was, "It never broke." (Sadly that company went bankrupt in the financial crisis, so her code is probably now dead.)
Code can live forever.
What can I say, it's time to die.
A karma 3 account. Where are the Perl-hating trolls coming from on HN? (I thought Guido said that it was time to stop trolling, so it isn't Python people now?)
I won't explain myself, smoyer's example (except the 'hate' part) pretty much sums up what I think about Perl. And yes, I believe it's a great language, although looking from a state of development of modern languages point of view, objectively speaking, it's a bit outdated language. And therefore, in my opinion, will find less and less applications in the future (and yes, Python is and will be its main competitor in many fields).