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Perl Startups: Lacuna Expanse

blogs.perl.org

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Re: Perl Startups: Lacuna Expanse

#11

Post by ownagefool »

james2vegas wrote: post #5
systems wrote: post #2

a bit off topic, but i really wish if jetbrains creates an ide for perl, similar to their pycharm or phpstorm i believe compared to other younger languages perl can be overwhelming, and i think a great ide will go a long way reducing the barrier of entry to new comers

a bit off topic, i really wish Perl CMSes would stop dropping Postgres support in favour of a MySQL only strategy (Movable Type and WebGUI [Plain Black], this means you). You'd think DBI did not exist or that this was really PHP.

PHP has a database abrstraction layer built into language that offers support for postgres in addition to a couple of fairly popular abstractions / ORMs / other alternatives.

This has nothing to do with either language and everything to do with the projects themselves. Stop dissing languages based on the distant past, especially not when using Perl.

Re: Perl Startups: Lacuna Expanse

#13

Post by gautamsomani »

reidrac wrote: post #10

I've been a Perl fan for years and I really enjoyed using the language in my personal projects (and in a couple of professional projects, it was "the secret ingredient"), but I couldn't fight all the prejudices surrounding Perl; so I finally gave up and learnt Python hoping to find a quality job as software developer. It worked out pretty well and I found a great job. I love doing Python, the community and the cultur…

But he used perl to build some thing huge. Just wondering if that huge thing would have run as smooth in python as in perl?

Re: Perl Startups: Lacuna Expanse

#15

Post by dragonwriter »

Its mildly interesting but the conclusions stated on alternative languages seem somewhat odd, and what is presented isn't enough to tell the real reasons for them. It also seems to conflate platforms with languages (e.g., the "Mono is no real substitute" in regard to C#; there are some ways -- which might be important -- where Mono doesn't substitute for .NET, particularly in terms of library support, but C# on Mono and C# on .NET, from a language perspective, aren't that far apart.)

And even to the extent I can pull apart some idea of the preferences underlying the conclusions, I simply can't fathom the idea that C# is in any way an inferior language to Java in a way which the tie to Microsoft would be on top of the some language inferiority as presented here.

So, in the end, I don't get much from this than that Perl was chosen because they like Perl better based on underlying preferences that aren't really clear at all.

Re: Perl Startups: Lacuna Expanse

#16

Post by gautamsomani »

simula67 wrote: post #14

Perl is not going away any time soon. 1,20,000 packages[1] ( compared to Pypi : 32621 [2] and Rubygems : 59,519 [3] )is nothing to scoff at. [1] http://www.cpan.org/ [2] https://pypi.python.org/pypi [3] http://rubygems.org/

Just curious, are those packages being re-written to make them better and faster (if they can be, that is)?

Re: Perl Startups: Lacuna Expanse

#17

Post by chipotle_coyote »

ownagefool wrote: post #9
noonespecial wrote: post #4

I love his system of regularly evaluating other languages to see what advantages they might offer him. It just goes to show: Don't worry about using the "best language", just use the best language for you .

Based on what he posted, either he's doing an extremely superficial comparison or he's done a proper one and realised there is actually not a lot in it when talking about modern languages. Fair enough, he wants to continue to use Perl because it's familiar and there aren't really massive advantages to using the other languages, that's a fair point, but state that as opposed to having a tone that suggests Perl is a be…

There does seem to be a certain amount of truth to the "oh, you kids, we were doing that in Perl ten years ago" attitude I occasionally run into. (Sort of like Lispers, except they invented whatever cool feature you think is new back in 1958.) But it's hard to justify switching from something else to Perl, and indeed I think your rephrasing -- "it's familiar and there aren't really massive advantages to using the other languages" -- about sums this up. (Largely why I've been using PHP for a current project, despite agreeing with a lot of the criticisms people make of it.)

I'm not sure I can see explicitly choosing to learn "modern" Perl to start a new project in, though. Personally I prefer Python over Ruby, unlike the author here, but I prefer both of them to Perl and its extremely... eclectic syntax. I once failed a job interview because I joked that Perl was a read-only language, but it really frequently is.

Re: Perl Startups: Lacuna Expanse

#18

Post by robotmay »

thomasjames wrote: post #8

I feel like that, among Perl startups, DuckDuckGo is the elephant in the room these days.

Their introduction to Perl and documentation for it is really quite handy for someone coming from another language. I wrote a plugin in Perl without any previous knowledge of it and it only took an evening. And as it turns out I quite like Perl now.

Re: Perl Startups: Lacuna Expanse

#19

Post by anon_java_hater »

reidrac wrote: post #10

I've been a Perl fan for years and I really enjoyed using the language in my personal projects (and in a couple of professional projects, it was "the secret ingredient"), but I couldn't fight all the prejudices surrounding Perl; so I finally gave up and learnt Python hoping to find a quality job as software developer. It worked out pretty well and I found a great job. I love doing Python, the community and the cultur…

It sounds like you don't actually understand technical tradeoffs of programming languages.

>I couldn't fight all the prejudices surrounding Perl

Programming languages aren't people, you can't be racist against a PL. Stop using rhetoric and instead talk technical. The reason most people don't use Perl is because it's both impractical and theoretically stupid (not composable, etc). It's kind of hard not to be prejudice against a language that has (albeit optional) dynamic name resolution. The only time I've seen Perl work is for writing tiny scripts (e.g milworm.com), but there are tons of other languages that can be done in. It's actually funny because the fact that you don't have to escape regular expressions in the source of a Perl program is probably one of the only reasons it's popular for writing crappy scripts.

>it's up to you if your code is readable, maintainable and easy to deploy.

By that logic assembly language would be considered usable for large projects

Re: Perl Startups: Lacuna Expanse

#20

Post by scardine »

gautamsomani wrote: post #13
reidrac wrote: post #10

I've been a Perl fan for years and I really enjoyed using the language in my personal projects (and in a couple of professional projects, it was "the secret ingredient"), but I couldn't fight all the prejudices surrounding Perl; so I finally gave up and learnt Python hoping to find a quality job as software developer. It worked out pretty well and I found a great job. I love doing Python, the community and the cultur…

But he used perl to build some thing huge. Just wondering if that huge thing would have run as smooth in python as in perl?

I used to love Perl as well, it is amazing for text processing and at the time was the silver tape of Internet.

It is pleasant to write, but I can't say the same for reading: sometimes it is hard to understand my own Perl code after untouched for a few months. In this regard, my experience is the same: Python is more readable and easy to maintain.

There's more than one way to do it (TMTOWTDI or TIMTOWTDI, pronounced “Tim Toady”) is a Perl programming motto. This is diametrically opposed to the zen of Python: "There should be one-- and preferably only one --obvious way to do it"

Once you get used to Python, it is very hard to get back to “Tim Toady”, and your Python experience is likely to heavily influence how you write in other languages.

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