Interview: Larry Wall • Hacker News Board

Re: Interview: Larry Wall

#71

Post by rmchugh » Wed, Jul 15, 2015, 6:54 AM UTC

the linux voice interviews are in general really good. keep up the good work!

Re: Interview: Larry Wall

#72

Post by doomrobo » Wed, Jul 15, 2015, 7:03 AM UTC

>you have a lot of instances of shoving one word into a different slot...you could have something that you think of as a noun, but you can verb it

Oh, Larry

Re: Interview: Larry Wall

#73

Post by kriro » Wed, Jul 15, 2015, 7:14 AM UTC

Perl will always have a soft spot in my heart. I remember accidentally putting down the Llama book on a stove top, still have that half burned book.

Only non-trivial thing I ever wrote in Perl was the obligatory irc bot :) Spaceship operator...says it all imo

Those were different days. I got the O'Reilly catalog at a book store regularly and marveled at the possibilities and cool books because I didn't have reliable Internet.

Re: Interview: Larry Wall

#74

Post by kluck » Wed, Jul 15, 2015, 7:31 AM UTC

I will never give up on Perl. There are just a whole lot of really talented people involved ;)

Re: Interview: Larry Wall

#75

Post by vijucat » Wed, Jul 15, 2015, 7:35 AM UTC

While building perl6, you see "-Larry -Wall" as part of the gcc args, which I thought was a clever + syntactically correct joke :-)

Re: Interview: Larry Wall

#76

Post by vmorgulis » Wed, Jul 15, 2015, 7:48 AM UTC

vijucat wrote: post #75

While building perl6, you see "-Larry -Wall" as part of the gcc args, which I thought was a clever + syntactically correct joke :-)

It reminds me "-liberty" for "libiberty" ;)

Re: Interview: Larry Wall

#77

Post by davidgerard » Wed, Jul 15, 2015, 8:07 AM UTC

visarga wrote: post #67

davidgerard wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Think of it as the COBOL of the Internet. Nobody wants to think about it, but it sustains so much .

And by nobody we mean still lots of people who use it and love it. I know I am not alone.

Yes. Nobody hip, just everyone else ;-)

Re: Interview: Larry Wall

#78

Post by mksaunders » Wed, Jul 15, 2015, 8:16 AM UTC

rmchugh wrote: post #71

the linux voice interviews are in general really good. keep up the good work!

Thanks :-) Glad you enjoyed it.

Re: Interview: Larry Wall

#79

Post by collyw » Wed, Jul 15, 2015, 8:27 AM UTC

elchief wrote: post #38

Would I be nuts to pick perl over python as my main scripting/server admin language? I am a postgres, openbsd, data/text processing guy. OpenBSD is 40% perl. Postgres uses perl for its builds. Perl seems to have better text processing capabilities. But it seems to be dying out compared to python.

I disagree.

I do mainly Python / Django stuff these days, but if I have some syadmin type tasks, I will happily switch to Perl. It has better build in syntax for quick stuff, like renaming a bunch of files. Built in regexes are so much easier than farting about with object based regexes. Text processing is better. Stuff like file gobbing is built into the language.

Its easier to shoot yourself in the foot with Perl, so I'll choose Python for stuff that is more long term. It really depends what you want to do.

Re: Interview: Larry Wall

#80

Post by collyw » Wed, Jul 15, 2015, 8:33 AM UTC

eliben wrote: post #65

mempko wrote: post #24

I started learning perl 6 to prototype creating a DSL. Holy fucking shit perl grammars and actions are cool.

Yes, but... Perl's greatest criticism is that it's friggin' unreadable, especially when written by less-than-stellar coders. It's my impression from a skim of Perl 6 that due to a bunch of fairly intricate features added there, it will be come even less readable than Perl 5. Is that a mistaken assessment?

I have seen some bloody awful python code. (Though the worst was still Perl when a bioinformaticain colleague wouldn't even indent it properly.)