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The Perl Renaissance

lanyrd.com

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Re: The Perl Renaissance

#91

Post by jrockway »

wazoox wrote: post #5
nnq wrote: post #2

...don't get mad for the question, but: anybody has any arguments for using Perl instead of, let's say Python, these days? (besides the "I already know it incredibly well" argument) ...cause the lack of an answer to such a question has only one conclusion: the language is dying, even if this is not already happening in a visible way! (don't get me wrong, I'm not a Perl hater, and fyi, I think the world would be a muc…

Python significant white space. Really, that's what preventing me for ever liking Python.

Englishalsohassignificantwhitespace.

Re: The Perl Renaissance

#92

Post by alberich »

PommeDeTerre wrote: post #51
ww520 wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why won't you hire someone who has a unfavorable opinion on a language? Do you feel the same way if he mentioned Java instead of Python?

That's clearly not what he said. He just wants actual, technical arguments against a given language, rather than baseless claims that make no sense. I think it's quite reasonable to be suspicious of a interviewee who is against Python solely because it enforces sensible code indentation.

>> I think it's quite reasonable to be suspicious of a interviewee who is against Python solely because it enforces sensible code indentation.

Though saying "I don't like python's code indentation" is not the same as "I'm against python". Well, at least I see no relation between the two.

Re: The Perl Renaissance

#93

Post by sylvinus »

wazoox wrote: post #58
sylvinus wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Opinions on Python aside, I'd never hire somebody saying something like that at an interview, even about a language I don't like. You should really look past petty details when evaluating any tech and come up with actual arguments.

That doesn't make much sense to me. Let's say if I were interviewed at some place using Java, Python, C and Go, why shouldn't I state my personal language preferences? For most things as an hiring manager I'm OK with people working with their favourite language on whatever project I assign them to (as long as it isn't too esoteric; OCaml is OK, but Haskell is probably pushing it a bit too far, for instance), except w…

Personal language preferences are fine if they are justified by actual reasons like tech details, community, librairies, ...

Re: The Perl Renaissance

#94

Post by doktrin »

berntb wrote: post #89
doktrin wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Hence Twitter runs on Scala, Blekko runs on perl. Those are hardly equivalent (aside from the obvious differences in prominence, scale and relative importance between Blekko and Twitter). Scala shops attracts developers curious about new paradigms (FP / FP hybrid) whereas Perl shops tends to repel forward-looking developers who view it (accurately or not) as an ugly throwback to the year 2000. Put plainly : Scala s…

>>... is viewed as ... The GP argued why a tech choice is good, you answer by arguing the reality -- of the fud ! That was quite funny. Edit: OK, I was talking about the first part, CPAN. You only made claims about jobs (that there are no good Perl jobs being created, which duckduckgo by itself should have killed.)

I don't even know what this is supposed to mean.

The parent was making reference to the common notion that using outlier languages provides access to high quality talent. In certain cases this holds true, in others not. You will attract, on average, higher quality talent by using Clojure rather than Cobol.

EDIT (response to parent edit) : well, no. I never said there are "no good Perl jobs", just that Perl is not in and of itself a draw in the way that Scala / Clojure / Haskell might be. You could probably convince someone that there are cool opportunities in Fortran development, but very few are actively seeking them out.

Re: The Perl Renaissance

#95

Post by rdtsc »

autarch wrote: post #13
nnq wrote: post #2

...don't get mad for the question, but: anybody has any arguments for using Perl instead of, let's say Python, these days? (besides the "I already know it incredibly well" argument) ...cause the lack of an answer to such a question has only one conclusion: the language is dying, even if this is not already happening in a visible way! (don't get me wrong, I'm not a Perl hater, and fyi, I think the world would be a muc…

...don't get mad for the question, but: anybody has any arguments for using Python instead of, let's say Ruby, these days? (besides the "I already know it incredibly well" argument) ...cause the lack of an answer to such a question has only one conclusion: the language is dying, even if this is not already happening in a visible way! (don't get me wrong, I'm not a Python hater, and fyi, I think the world would be a m…

> anybody has any arguments for using Python instead of, let's say Ruby, these days

Yap.

* Better libraries

* PyPy

* gevent for green thread based concurrency

* Cython

Re: The Perl Renaissance

#96

Post by lutusp »

jrockway wrote: post #91
wazoox wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Python significant white space. Really, that's what preventing me for ever liking Python.

Englishalsohassignificantwhitespace.

Not a fair comparison -- English prose

doesn't

care

how

much

whitespace appears between words, only that there's more than none. Python definitely cares how much.

Don't get me wrong -- I like Python and I use it a lot, but its reliance on syntactically significant whitespace isn't in the plus column.

Re: The Perl Renaissance

#97

Post by berntb »

dangerlibrary wrote: post #88
berntb wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My argument was that a lack of real anonymous functions (> 1 instruction) is a problem in some quite common and useful scenarios. If you REALLY can give good references that show this is wrong, I'm very interested (like, I would guess, most Ruby users). (It would also be interesting with a link to a PEP or something with, as you claim, arguments that map etc should be discouraged -- and that is why no multi line lamb…

For most use cases where you want map/filter/etc, you can chain list comprehensions using generators.

You have no relevant comment on what I wrote either, I take it? Here I asked for references about the GP's claims.

Also, welcome to HN (or are the prepared troll accounts with a few hundreds of Karma running out? :-) ).

Re: The Perl Renaissance

#98

Post by pyre »

zby wrote: post #59
razzmataz wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nobody really seems to get that right.

Perl improved much in this area. The main reason for that is probably the automatic tests that for every new release on CPAN are run on a wide array of systems. This kind of infrastructure plus emphasis on having tests in the libraries is where Perl is still ahead of other languages.

That and the fact that you browse the documentation on CPAN. PyPI (for example) is only an index of packages, the documentation needs to be hosted elsewhere.

Re: The Perl Renaissance

#99

Post by pyre »

berntb wrote: post #97
dangerlibrary wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For most use cases where you want map/filter/etc, you can chain list comprehensions using generators.

You have no relevant comment on what I wrote either, I take it? Here I asked for references about the GP's claims. Also, welcome to HN (or are the prepared troll accounts with a few hundreds of Karma running out? :-) ).

  | (or are the prepared troll accounts with
  | a few hundreds of Karma running out? :-) )
Keepin' it classy.

Re: The Perl Renaissance

#100

Post by nnq »

nnq wrote: post #2

...don't get mad for the question, but: anybody has any arguments for using Perl instead of, let's say Python, these days? (besides the "I already know it incredibly well" argument) ...cause the lack of an answer to such a question has only one conclusion: the language is dying, even if this is not already happening in a visible way! (don't get me wrong, I'm not a Perl hater, and fyi, I think the world would be a muc…

disclaimer: I really didn't intend to transform this into a discussion that's 70% about Python (I could have said Ruby or Javascript instead, the question was about Perl and the comparison was just an example). Right now I would downvote my own parent comment if I could, just to get higher the other comments that are actually relevant to Perl programmers.
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