Live data from Hacker News

Perl is 26 Today

modernperlbooks.com

81–90 of 194 posts

Re: Perl is 26 Today

#81
post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you're looking for learning and reading material on Perl, http://perl-tutorials.org is the only way to go, exactly because Perl is so old.

The link seems to be a dead end.

Wow, i failed to link correctly to my own website. Sorry. :(

Re: Perl is 26 Today

#82

I 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.

As a Perl to Python convert, I miss Perl Monks. Google for anything Python / Django related, and you end up on Stack Overflow. But the attitude of many of the moderators is over the top, and they are definitely loosing something by not encouraging discussions like they do on Perl Monks. You will get your code to work, but you will be far less likely to come out with greater insight or understanding.

Re: Perl is 26 Today

#83
post #76
post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Perl is definitely a cool language. I've used it for 15 years. However, I feel like it made a wrong turn somewhere and Ruby and Python both passed it. I've done a a little Ruby and some Python. They've never grabbed me like Perl, but practically speaking I don't think there are enough reasons to choose the 3rd most popular scripting language. (Btw, I've listened to the CPAN argument for 10 years. It's not enough)

The wrong turn was "Perl 6", and despite what you may think, the problem was more in the "6" than the "Perl". There's nothing wrong with Perl 6, except that it should have been called something else so it didn't convince people it was the next Perl version. The Perl community has now recovered from that, Perl 5 and Perl 6 are officially understood to be distinct languages that merely love each other very much, and Pe…

True. I started with Perl in 2003, and there was news of Perl 6 being just round the corner then. The constant chimes of it will be ready "soon" with no specifics kept people excited for a while, but that wore off.

Re: Perl is 26 Today

#84
post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I answered a comment re threading, not different multi process implementations. I'd argue single process multiple threads, vs multiple process single thread, vs not blocking, are different solutions to the same problem: how do I take advantage of multiple cores? Saying other solutions don't apply, despite solving the problem, is a bit arbitrary.

As long as multi-processes can't share variables, nevermind complex data structures made of variables, they don't apply to the problem multi-threading solves.

shrug The queue module takes complex data structures, provides them to processes, which when finished doing whatever they do, send them back to other queues and in turn more processes.

It works, complex data structures are being shared. There's no nightmarish locking issues. Not sure what else you want.

Are you entirely sure you're not discounting the solution because It's Not What Java Does?

Re: Perl is 26 Today

#85
post #57
post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You really prefer Python threading to anything?! Sure. When I just want "run this task in the background, I don't particularly care about throughput but don't block entirely". There's a niche where a proper task queue is too heavy and shared variables are a perfectly adequate communication mechanism. > Don't get me started on list comprehension, extra stuff to learn because Python lack real maps with real lambdas.…

For stuff so trivial that even the GIL is no problem, most any utility should work... (You don't seem to know that Perls are usually not compiled with threading support?) It just isn't interesting to talk about. I argued that list comprehension's use cases are generally solved better with "real" lambdas + map (==> less to learn). To note that most every feature have some use case they are extra good for is not releva…

You don't seem to know that Perls are usually not compiled with threading support?

I've heard this a few times now, and find it interesting. I guess people that compile their own do it without threading support, but I would guess the majority of Perl interpreters out there were bundled from some third party (usually the distro), and those almost always have threading enabled.

Also, that's a good thing. I've made quite heavy use of threads over the years and find Perl's abstraction of OS threads is actually quite nice to use, as long as you play to their strengths. I.e. pre-create your threads, and thread them like pthreads with easier IPC. If you want "green" threads, use any of the numerous packages that provide it.

Re: Perl is 26 Today

#86
post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not a perl coder, but the library support does seem pretty fantastic - http://www.cpan.org/

I would say "pretty fantastic" is an understatement...CPAN is the gold standard of library support

Maybe, for the modules that build and actually have useful documentation. That seemed to me to be depressingly uncommon.

Re: Perl is 26 Today

#87

Been using Perl for almost 10 years now. I've used Perl for almost everything. Web development using CGI::Application, developing my own web framework, console apps (using the ncurses library), POE (Perl Object Environment), Web socket stuff and more. My main job currently involves maintaining and developing a huge code base in Perl including three websites (soon to expand to much more). Perl just works. I thoroughly…

Stevan Little, the author of Moose, is working on updating the Perl5 core to have a Moose-inspired Meta Object Protocol, called p5-mop. Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4YZNwO-uCVg Github: https://github.com/stevan/p5-mop-redux/ I'm personally interested to see how this develops. As to my own Perl story, I used it exclusively in my first (non-student) programming job, back in the summer of 2000. I built an e-co…

Ha ha, your nickname says it all. Back when I started programming in 2000 all my yahoo, MSN and skype (when it was released) accounts either had the word linux or perl in it.

Then unfortunately I had to become more professional and started using my real name. :)

Re: Perl is 26 Today

#89
post #43

Favorite Perl story (despite it being the first language I used to program the web back in college). I once had to work on a an ASP (MSFT Active Server Pages circa 2001?) website that was written with ActivePerl [1]. Their technologist chose it, then left the company, and they had a hard time finding someone to work on it. Also, the Programming Perl book was my first O'Reily book that I read/used, checkout out from c…

I think that Learning Perl and Programming Perl were the books that put O'Reilly on the map. Lerning Perl was the best intro to programming book of it's generation for sure.
Post reply on HN