Favorite Perl snippet (from Joseph Hall's EPP book) [$x => $y]->[$x Holy shit - just realized I first touched Perl 15 years ago!
What does that do?
The same thing as ($x, $y)[$x <= $y] but it looks cooler.
Perl is 26 Today
101–110 of 194 posts
Re: Perl is 26 Today
#102Earlier quoted context omitted.
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?
I'm sorry if that wasn't clear, sharing doesn't only mean "making the data available" but also means high performance and direct access. Quite simply though: If you can't imagine different use profiles that make certain multi-processing paradigms better suited than others, then you shouldn't be having this discussion and should be getting more experience outside of what you're doing right now.
Re: Perl is 26 Today
#103I 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 res…
> Language design isn't done, and languages are getting better all the time.
That is actually what Perl is doing. With its loose original design it can evolve amazingly, and in ways that couldn't be foreseen.
Re: Perl is 26 Today
#104Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
See CPAN Testers:
Re: Perl is 26 Today
#105Earlier quoted context omitted.
>> max, min [etc] Perl has a minimal std library, to teach people to use CPAN I guess. But even Perl has util modules for trivial help functions in the std install (at least those which aren't one line of code to define). The strongest argument for Perl today is CPAN and CPAN Testers, still the gold standard. But all the scripting languages are really similar, there is no reason to learn another if you already know o…
Django was the reason I switched. I gave Catalyst a go, but the ability to swap out almost every component left me wondering what the framework actually was. The documentation was significantly easier (for a newbie to web frameworks) to get something going. And the Django admin gave me a large chunk of what I wanted for very little effort.
Yeah, Django has a really well planned ramp up for a newbie. Especially compared to Catalyst among the Perl frameworks. The ORM was a bit of pain (had to do jump through hoops just to get multiple column indexes, iirc?). But in the end, after a few months of work it doesn't make so much difference in total time.
Re: Perl is 26 Today
#106hahaha. Perl is 2 years older than me.
You don't even want to know how old FORTRAN is :-)
Re: Perl is 26 Today
#107So when I went to Google I learned Python. I enjoyed the language and used it a lot, it has a solid support base and pretty much anything you wanted to do you could import a module to do it. When I went to Blekko they were a perl shop, which was a bit intimidating at first, but after programming in it for nearly 4 years now I find I can get from concept to first test faster in Perl than I could in Python. And I hadn't realized how much the Python indentation stuff bugged me until I got back into a scripting language with braces.
At the end of the day I find I prefer perl for quick things, and Python for multithreaded things.
Re: Perl is 26 Today
#108Was introduced to Perl in a programming languages course in college in 1996/1997. Brought it to my first job, where it gained fame there for being the language that took a 12 hour process and ran it in less than a minute. (They had originally been trying to parse a huge log file with Visual Basic, I believe it was. Perl was made for, well, extraction and reporting...) Been programming in it full time ever since. Than…
Adding a bit of praise for "Programming Perl". (As well as for some of the other books by the fine people you've listed.)
"Programming Perl" is not just (very) informative, it is also engagingly, even entertainingly informative.
(Proof of this is left as an exercise for the reader... ;-)
Re: Perl is 26 Today
#109Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 res…
The Perl culture is very much "Wild West" meets the race to space. It's a language for people who are comfortable enough around theory that they don't need syntax to force them to use it. At the same time, it's highly evolutionary -- it supports the fastest, dirtiest, hackinest method of getting to the goal -- and thus has prototyping built in to production. I often write Perl scripts twice. The first is a tape-up jo…
I had similar experience when I started Perl.
I was used to take a problem of a certain size, sit down and think for a while. Then code C for maybe 3 to 10 days.
When I did a similar problem in Perl, the time to think for a problem of that size was longer than the time to throw a solution at the wall! You could design using code, then refactor/rewrite if it got too bad.
Best of all: So much more fun.
Re: Perl is 26 Today
#110I'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.
With PHP, Python, Ruby and Javascript... space seems tight for another scripting language.
That's an ironic statement, since Perl came first and was absolutely dominant in the domains which PHP, Python, Ruby, and Javascript now occupy. When they were young, it would have been reasonable to say that space seems tight for another scripting language because we had Perl.
Languages like Lua have something special. What's special about Perl?
What's special about Lua? That's a four-word question that could require a huge response. Lua's a nice little embeddable scripting language, but that's a niche that Perl has occupied too. It's got fantastic support for both being embedded (callable from other languages) and embedding (able to call other languages). You might say that Lua's better because it's smaller and cleaner and simpler, but that's only true until you run into Lua not being powerful enough for something you want to do. If you used Perl as your embedded scripting language instead, you probably wouldn't have that problem. (Other problems, maybe, but not a lack of power.)