Perl is 26 Today
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Perl is 26 Today
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Re: Perl is 26 Today
#2I am a Perl user and I do like it very much (warts and all). This article reminded me of another self-deprecatory Perl article:
http://ebb.org/bkuhn/blog/2012/12/18/perl-cobol.html
And yes, as the article says, Here's to 26 more! :-)
Re: Perl is 26 Today
#3I'm a relatively new programmer. Been programming for around 4 years. I tried Perl, but felt like the world had moved on, so I never really committed to it.
With PHP, Python, Ruby and Javascript... space seems tight for another scripting language. Languages like Lua have something special. What's special about Perl?
Edit: I don't want to be hateful. The more the merrier obviously.
Re: Perl is 26 Today
#4Many happy returns of the day. Good old Perl. I'd be happy to use other languages, but I tend to get plenty of offers to continue using this one. :-)
Re: Perl is 26 Today
#5I'm a relatively new programmer. Been programming for around 4 years. I tried Perl, but felt like the world had moved on, so I never really committed to it. With PHP, Python, Ruby and Javascript... space seems tight for another scripting language. Languages like Lua have something special. What's special about Perl? Edit: I don't want to be hateful. The more the merrier obviously.
I'm not a perl coder, but the library support does seem pretty fantastic - http://www.cpan.org/
Re: Perl is 26 Today
#6I'm a relatively new programmer. Been programming for around 4 years. I tried Perl, but felt like the world had moved on, so I never really committed to it. With PHP, Python, Ruby and Javascript... space seems tight for another scripting language. Languages like Lua have something special. What's special about Perl? Edit: I don't want to be hateful. The more the merrier obviously.
There is, in fact, all the space in the world.
Re: Perl is 26 Today
#7I'm a relatively new programmer. Been programming for around 4 years. I tried Perl, but felt like the world had moved on, so I never really committed to it. With PHP, Python, Ruby and Javascript... space seems tight for another scripting language. Languages like Lua have something special. What's special about Perl? Edit: I don't want to be hateful. The more the merrier obviously.
I moved from Perl to Python 3 years ago.
Its true. Perl feels like a very powerful base language, moving to Python felt like you were taking a bit away (I know in reality you can probably achieve much the same things). Python on the other hand doesn't require you to implement your own basic functions (max, min , trim / strip ) as they are included already. Python stops me from shooting myself in the foot as often, by not allowing me to do stuff that is too clever too early.
I do miss being able to reference / deference variables explicitly though. Other great things are, CPAN, regular expression support (that never feels as nice in Python), one liners for doing stuff quickly on the command line. I even quite like the sigils, as an easy way to recognize the types of variable you are dealing with (though it is confusing at first). Working with strings feels a lot more natural in Perl than Python.
Re: Perl is 26 Today
#8I recently turned into a Perl user. Though I must say, documentation about Perl with CGI, and pre-made scripts are a let down. I browsed many O-Reilly books on Perl, CGI is one of the least explanative topics. Some modules have very obscure explanation on CPAN, I don't mean any offense.
If not for Perl Monks, my enthusiasm might have been lost midway.
Re: Perl is 26 Today
#9I am a Perl user and I do like it very much (warts and all). This article reminded me of another self-deprecatory Perl article: http://ebb.org/bkuhn/blog/2012/12/18/perl-cobol.html And yes, as the article says, Here's to 26 more! :-)
That's an interesting article but seems to be missing the actual why of it. He still likes perl because... culture? Some people are still writing software in perl or cobol, sure - and some of that is good software that solves real problems. But the reason we think of the average programmer in one of these obsolete languages as "some sort of second-class technology citizen" is that, well, they are. Compared to the rest of us they spend more time working around language deficiencies, inadequate tooling and all the rest of it, and less time making interesting things.
Right now I'm a huge Scala fan. I've had that experience of feeling that I never want to program in any other language again (and every other language I've gone to, even those I used to like, feels clumsy and tedious by comparison). But I hope that in 25 years' time I'll have moved on to something even better. Language design isn't done, and languages are getting better all the time.
Re: Perl is 26 Today
#10I'm a relatively new programmer. Been programming for around 4 years. I tried Perl, but felt like the world had moved on, so I never really committed to it. With PHP, Python, Ruby and Javascript... space seems tight for another scripting language. Languages like Lua have something special. What's special about Perl? Edit: I don't want to be hateful. The more the merrier obviously.
Perl's older than most of those.
The original killer feature of Perl was regexs - these existed before, but Perl's implementation destroyed all others, and 'PCRE' (Perl compatible regular expressions) became the default - most modern languages use PCREs for their regexs.
There was some bad stuff that happened with this too - people used regexs for ghetto, half-assed versions of tree structures like HTML and XML - but for the task of chewing through Unix config files, up until around 2005 Perl was unbeatable because of the awesome regex support (and because it's history meant, at the time, perl was installed on all Unix boxes).