Perl is 25 years old today

Post by noonespecial » Wed, Dec 19, 2012, 3:57 AM UTC

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…

Post by trhtrsh » Wed, Dec 19, 2012, 4:27 AM UTC

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.

Post by asher » Wed, Dec 19, 2012, 4:31 AM UTC

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…

  m = re.match(r'(\d{4})', buf)
  if m:
    print "year: %s" % m.group(1)

  @good = grep { $_->{width} > 9 } @crates;
  good = [c for c in crates if c['width'] > 9]

  @squares = map { $_ * $_ } @nums;
  squares = [i*i for i in nums]

  c = PerlishStruct()
  c['foo'][17]['bar'] = 'baz'

Post by ChuckMcM » Wed, Dec 19, 2012, 5:00 AM UTC

trhtrsh wrote: post #112

ChuckMcM wrote: post #75

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 writte…

The V3/V4 days ended in 1994 , before Java 1.0 was released. http://perldoc.perl.org/perlhist.html

Post by berntb » Wed, Dec 19, 2012, 6:45 AM UTC

asher wrote: post #115

ajross wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I agree with you about the feeling of fragility, especially with defaultdicts. As for regexes - while they are somewhat clumsy in python, they don't have to be defined distantly: m = re.match(r'(\d{4})', buf) if m: print "year: %s" % m.group(1) The only thing that really bothers me about the above is the need to separate the assignment of m from the test. Re comprehensions: seems to me they are just Python's version…

  m = re.match(r'(\d{4})', buf)