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Why Perl Didn't Win

outspeaking.com

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131–140 of 157 posts

Re: Why Perl Didn't Win

#131

Post by crahrah »

SilasX wrote: post #72
crahrah wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

""non-standard" bits of the language start leaking into your code" I work on a small team (C++), so this has never been an issue. If you break coding guidelines someone will notice and let you know. But this really should be integrated into work-flows. (ie/ into Gitlab, Jira, etc.) There should be some kind of step - before you are allowed to merge code - that checks that you are withing coding guidelines.

Yes, those are called linters: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lint_%28software%29

Thank you very much for showing me this. I'll definitely look into it.

Learning something new every day =)

Re: Why Perl Didn't Win

#132

Post by ghshephard »

Mithaldu wrote: post #125
ghshephard wrote: post #18

I was a Perl scripter (I never rose to the level of JAPH) from around 1998 to 2002, with my final accomplishment being a two-way HRIS synchronization system between our installation of peoplesoft and our LDAP server (Netscape LDAP server, awesome product). And then I met Python, and I never wrote another line of Perl, and have written some python code almost every week since then. There were two personal reasons why…

A consideration to you: You spent 4 years of learning Perl, 4 years in which you likely also massively improved your skills as a programmer, regardless of the Perl angle. Then you went to Python, bringing in your programmer experience, probably started off with a good book and had a much happier time. So, do challenge yourself and ponder how much of that come from having spent 4 years programming, and how much from a…

It's an interesting perspective, but, seriously - for the life of me, I struggled every time I wanted to declare/parse/initialize an AoH or HoA on perl. And I'm not engaging in hyperbole when I said that my code was basically completely foreign to me a week after writing it.

Obviously developers (which I am not), and people with more discipline and structure, and write eminently readable and maintainable perl code - but as my day job was network engineering, I was just looking for the lowest cost path to get the job done.

I really did love CPAN though.

Re: Why Perl Didn't Win

#133

Post by twic »

stcredzero wrote: post #120
twic wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The semicolon separates two independent clauses, but they constitute a single sentence. When we're thinking about language, clauses are probably a better atomic unit than sentences; clauses are a semantic unit, and sentences are really just a syntactic packaging format for some number of clauses. Just like we should be counting expressions (or something) rather than lines of code.

I'll take that comment as a parody?

Sure, whatever you like.

Re: Why Perl Didn't Win

#134

Post by BugBrother »

seanmcdirmid wrote: post #130
BugBrother wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Old trolling is respected? Something like religion then, were people hearing voices long ago got followers -- but today generally are locked up? :-)

Perl has always been the butt of write-only jokes within the PL community; just imagine Perl as Rodney Dangerfield complaining that it "gets no respect." APL is of course, the canonical write-only language, but it is completely honest and accepting about it. I programmed in Perl for CGI in the mid 90s and didn't see anything wrong with it. It was weird, but I had programmed with much worse before then (Lotus Notes Sc…

Well, not really relevant for either Modern Perl or my point.

(Or that it gets a bit old after a few hundred times on HN, now with newly created accounts. No one want anyone to do the same for other subjects.)

Mid 90s? 20 years ago, just after the release of Perl 5 and before everything else? I understand your opinion... :-)

Re: Why Perl Didn't Win

#135

Post by kbenson »

ghshephard wrote: post #132
Mithaldu wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A consideration to you: You spent 4 years of learning Perl, 4 years in which you likely also massively improved your skills as a programmer, regardless of the Perl angle. Then you went to Python, bringing in your programmer experience, probably started off with a good book and had a much happier time. So, do challenge yourself and ponder how much of that come from having spent 4 years programming, and how much from a…

It's an interesting perspective, but, seriously - for the life of me, I struggled every time I wanted to declare/parse/initialize an AoH or HoA on perl. And I'm not engaging in hyperbole when I said that my code was basically completely foreign to me a week after writing it. Obviously developers (which I am not), and people with more discipline and structure, and write eminently readable and maintainable perl code -…

That's interesting, because defining an AoH or HoA in Perl is almost identical to how you would do it in Javascript, which is to say it looks a lot like JSON.

If it was the access and assignment semantics, the normal case is also fairly straightforward; use curly braces for hash/dict keys, square brackets for array indices.

E.g.

    my %data =  (
        foo => [
            { bar => 10, baz => 12 },
            { bar => 20, baz => 13 },
            { bar => 30, baz => 14 },
        ],
    );
    print $data{foo}[2]{bar}; # 30
    push $data{foo}, { bar => 40, baz => 15 };
Given, using array and hash references with the built-in push,pop,shift,unshift,keys,values and each used to require some annoying dereferencing that could be confusing.

Do you still find that confusing?

Re: Why Perl Didn't Win

#136

Post by kbenson »

simonw wrote: post #32
[deleted] wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[deleted]

Regexes are actually a great example of a tool that makes it easy to write code that is difficult for you to fully understand later.

Regexes are an easy way to include a second language into your project without realizing it. If you don't put the same discipline on that language as you do the one you are using it in, you are raising your likelihood of problems. Well commented[1] and modularized (for large enough) regular expressions can be just as readable, as long as you accept you are no longer using a single language.

1: http://perldoc.perl.org/perlretut.html#Embedding-comments-an...

Re: Why Perl Didn't Win

#138

Post by mamcx »

mst wrote: post #82
bane wrote: post #7

Maintenance. I say this as somebody who loves Perl, quirks and all (actually because of the quirks). It's actually a beautiful language to work in in the same way English is a beautiful language -- it's a beauty because it's a goddamn mess. But it's a rotten language to maintain. Sure, it's perfectly possible to write highly maintainable code (I have a few 30-40k line Perl projects that I can open up and get right to…

I don't want the popularity we once had. The same people who wrote unreadable, unmaintainable perl went on to do the same sort of damage in PHP, then python, then ruby/rails, and now node.js/go. They were never a net positive to the community, and I'm not sorry to see them causing problems for somebody else. (and before somebody says "but that doesn't happen in X" ... yes, it does, even python lets you write code tha…

With python is not the same. Even if the developers is truly bad and do a mess, is a decipherable mess. Requiere truly talent to do a hard-to-understand mess in python, and in that case, is very likely the code was made by a good developer ;)

Re: Why Perl Didn't Win

#139

Post by vampirechicken »

I never understand the apparent glee with which people perform premature post-mortems on Perl.

You never really see people declaring any other language moribund, and then kicking it a couple of times for fun.

I don't see the point?

Re: Why Perl Didn't Win

#140

Post by raiph »

The domain outspeaking.com is owned by chromatic's company.

Afaict chromatic was the first to promote the article with a tweet shortly after it was published and shortly before it appeared here on HN and reddit.

When someone noted this connection on reddit and said they thought chromatic wrote it his response was "I'm not the only person with access to the server. Anonymous wrote that article."

http://www.reddit.com/r/perl/comments/27o6h5/why_perl_didnt_...

Even if it's not chromatic (I think it is), is it not obvious that the OP article is designed to garner inbound links/views (and sell books) rather than provide a balanced picture? Consider the juxtaposition of the deceitful title and well written content. Do you see what the author did there?

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