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Perl is 25 years old today

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Re: Perl is 25 years old today

#91

Post by rjbond3rd »

slurgfest wrote: post #67
berntb wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You claim to really not be aware that table is for a quite different language -- Perl 6? That point has been made many, many times. Edit: To the cultural question, there might be a point. I might add that I don't know Perl 6, but it seems like an insane amount of cool/fun toys (macro language like lisp with an Algol-like syntax?! If they can pull that off it is incredible.) That might say something about me and Perl…

I also think Perl 6 has some really cool and innovative ideas. Far from using it to smear Perl, I think it is more interesting than previous versions. But you are in denial if you think that this chart isn't a reasonably representative cultural artifact of the Perl community and the Perl aesthetic. Perl 5 is not exactly poor in operators, and it is the same core community which produced both. I don't think that Perl…

Is there really such a great difference between operators vs. class/method/function names? E.g., Math.pow() vs. ?

Re: Perl is 25 years old today

#92

Post by IheartApplesDix »

bcoates wrote: post #55
RyanMcGreal wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was going to downvote your comment, but then I clicked through and read the linked question and commentary.

I don't get what the issue is, I don't even know Perl and it seems pretty straightforward to me: Carp is a library with a set of mnemonic assertion functions for libraries to signal usage errors committed by their callers. Do people just prefer one function with a bunch of fiddly little enums or something?

People prefer what they've already learned.

Re: Perl is 25 years old today

#94

Post by MichaelGG »

btilly wrote: post #88
rootbear wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

COBOL. 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 foun…

A few years back, we bought a commercial address processing/validation library to use with .NET. I noticed it had a dependency on the .NET Fujitsu COBOL runtime. So even newer development might pull in COBOL code without even knowing it.

Re: Perl is 25 years old today

#95

Post by mdellabitta »

rjbond3rd wrote: post #91
slurgfest wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I also think Perl 6 has some really cool and innovative ideas. Far from using it to smear Perl, I think it is more interesting than previous versions. But you are in denial if you think that this chart isn't a reasonably representative cultural artifact of the Perl community and the Perl aesthetic. Perl 5 is not exactly poor in operators, and it is the same core community which produced both. I don't think that Perl…

Is there really such a great difference between operators vs. class/method/function names? E.g., Math.pow() vs. ?

There's a huge difference in searchability for one.

Re: Perl is 25 years old today

#96

Post by hercynium »

ajross wrote: post #57
3amOpsGuy wrote: post #4

Before i switched to Python as my general purpose language, i used to be a bit of a Perl fanatic. I've still to come across a language that lets you get your ideas down as quickly. It's full of fantastic time savers, e.g. the for( ) construct and the format output functionality cover a bunch of common use cases in minimal keystrokes (let me pipe in some data, analyse it, then spit it out in a clean report). It can hu…

My experience is almost exactly the opposite. Whenever I'm writing in Python I can't escape the feeling that the code is simply fragile due to missing language features. Obviously this starts with all the regex initializations (often quite distant in source from where they are applied) which make regular expressions in python just a huge mess. Perl's autovification allows me to build a data structure at parse time wi…

For list comprehensions and a different style of generator, look at https://metacpan.org/module/List::Gen

And then there are a pile of modules that implement python-style generators, some using https://metacpan.org/module/Coro (co-routines implemented as threads), some using crazy hacks:

https://metacpan.org/module/Compile::Generators

https://metacpan.org/module/Coro::Generator

https://metacpan.org/module/Attribute::Generator

Re: Perl is 25 years old today

#97

Post by lloeki »

rootbear wrote: post #84
lloeki wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> It would be interesting to know if anything older than Fortran 77 is still in active use.

In active use, that's actually easy, especially in the industrial space (that's why I mentioned distributed as well as active, which gives another metric entirely)

Just about a year ago I was tasked with recovering software from a HP1000/RTE machine (driving an industrial oven in a forge), written in a Fortran dating back from before it was properly standardized.

We recovered the code through the machine's serial port, with the built in print functionality, which conveniently prepended a header along with the file's content. Together with pyserial at the other end, a few hours of hacking had a laptop listen via a PL2302 serial/USB adapter, parsed the printed header to get filename and a few metadata, and wrote content to the proper location.

The harder part was manually moving through directories, and printing the files at 1200 baud, through a terribly laggy and completely burned out 80x23 passive monitor.

Headers in the code mentioned it was actually older than me.

With a few massaging, the code actually compiled on a recent gfortran (F95!), but hte linking part was entirely different, and many proprietary symbols were missing. We went through the 30 years old documentation and found what we needed to stub them and plan how to act forward. The thing was actually quite close already to Unix and what we find on Linux these days, only much much more primitive. The code contained critical functions whose role was to compute thermal data for automation, according to various (thermodynamic and other) complex and undocumented rules, so I built a detailed plan about possible actions to take, including linking to C wrappers binding the stuff into Python, complete with a prototypal HTML5 visual status feedback of the automation system. That's when I left the project (and the job).

Re: Perl is 25 years old today

#98

Post by rjbond3rd »

mdellabitta wrote: post #95
rjbond3rd wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is there really such a great difference between operators vs. class/method/function names? E.g., Math.pow() vs. ?

There's a huge difference in searchability for one.

Maybe, though personally, "perl operators" has never failed me in Google.

Re: Perl is 25 years old today

#99

Post by derleth »

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…

> a "perl" program

Why is perl in quotes here?

Re: Perl is 25 years old today

#100

Post by derleth »

prodigal_erik wrote: post #65
felideon wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Lisp was invented 54 years ago. The Common Lisp standard is the capstone on an unusually long and fractured history of development. Fortunately many of those good ideas have trickled down over the decades, making mainstream languages steadily less terrible, and competing proprietary implementations are no longer commonplace.

> Lisp was invented 54 years ago. The Common Lisp standard is the capstone on an unusually long and fractured history of development.

Hm. If we do this, then C++ is merely one 'capstone' on the history of Algol development, which is about as old as Lisp is.

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