Perl Startups: Lacuna Expanse

Agreed, I"m a Ruby person personally and often end up writing things that later I only shake my head at and rip out and replace with a few lines or a better idiom/algorithm.

To be honest the parent comment to yours first link reminds me of a rather lot of shell/perl created by people that treat things with the procedural mindset and just keep bashing their heads against a problem until it succeeds. There isn't anything wrong with that but that python really is no different stylistically than any of the "horrible perl" stories I've seen. I've seen perl that made most ruby look unreadable at first glance too. I think it really goes to show encrypting human thought into programming languages is not trivial. Also I'm getting sick of these $foo_language is better/worse/a threat(really threat? weird word choice imo) to anything. Every language I learn I learn something new in. Even if its the ones I don't like much like Java/PHP, doesn't mean they're bad languages or they're devoid of being able to teach you new ways to approach problems.

Meh, ranted longer about this than I'd thought I would.

I despise Pythonistas because for their negative and controversial propaganda like this cartoon. http://bit.ly/14GmKsP

Totally agree. HN comments rarely stay on page.

The online front-end is awesome. I've never seen anything like it in CPAN, though I've never really looked for intense GUI. This is the first online game I'm motivated to pick at, hoping to see where the perl CGI spins.

Looking up `lacuna', the single example of usage quote:

"self-centered in opinion, with curious lacunae of astounding ignorance"

seems keenly apt for most of us, I myself have over-focused for so long now on emacs, perl, that it would be foolish for me to voice an opinion on other contemporary languages, or my `problem with vi'.

I really don't like the hate for perl. Sure, it's got some stuff which can be a bit difficult to understand at first, but that flexibility is nice when you just want to whip something up quickly. It reminds me of how people love to hate Java because of it's verbose code (myself included). At the end of the day, if you know what you're doing it really doesn't get in your way.

I do a lot of metaprogramming and text processing at my job. Using regex as much as I need to in most other languages just feels clumsy compared to perl. It's a great language for sysadmin type stuff. It has a good niche. I wouldn't use it for what this guy did, but I have no doubt that tons of stuff in CPAN probably made his job significantly easier.

I don't think perl is hard to learn - I spent a few days with the camel book and was able to pick it up fairly quickly - and as others have said any language can be unreadable or abused. Also, I don't use Moose or objects in perl and I think that OOP can be cool but can also be abused just as much as perl's nonstandard syntax.

When it comes to other types of projects, I don't think your language of choice makes a huge difference in theory. I think javascript, perl, python are all pretty good and not too hard to pick up if you already have programming experience (don't know about ruby, although I assume that the same holds true). What really makes a difference in practice is the network effects, though. I really love perl, but I'm going to go out of my way to learn other languages because no one respects it and the job market isn't as good for it. Oh well. I don't really mind having to choose based on fads because I honestly think that my choice of programming languages won't make much of a difference on my performance.

Sounds like you have the right tool for the job. I'd be curious to know if you use Perl for large projects with long lifetimes (and if so, strategies for doing so effectively).