Half My Life with Perl
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Half My Life with Perl
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Re: Half My Life with Perl
#2Perl is one of those power tools(as recommended in Let Over Lambda, together with vim and Lisp), if you learn it well enough to be good at it, and early enough in your career- You really have a mad productivity work horse. Its really one of those things which save tons of time and effort. A bit like O(1) hack of the productivity world.
Perhaps at the core of this just how many what we called regular programming tasks are just knowing how to work with text and unixy operating system. Perl is just unbelievably awesome at this. Another big edge of Perl is commitment to backwards compatibility, most people who learned Perl early in their careers decades back can use it on-demand basis. Its universally installed, fast and scripts written from the earliest days continue to run with 0 changes, despite endless OS upgrades.
Early enough in the timeline Perl was full unix hackers, and you learned a lot from them, this culture further bolsters Perl's productivity credentials. Not a week passes, that I have to whip up a Perl script to do something for someone has a 2 people and a month budget to do. And they are often amazed it can be done this quickly.
CPAN is another big edge Perl has. No other language apart from JS/npm ecosystem has anything close, and these are basically competing in very different domains so to that end CPAN really doesn't have a competition till date.
If you are looking to build using Perl do checkout the Camel book and HOP by mjd.
Re: Half My Life with Perl
#3I learned Perl 4.036 for a university course (computational linguistics, appropriately enough) in 1996. That's ... more than half my life away.
Re: Half My Life with Perl
#4Perl is one of those power tools(as recommended in Let Over Lambda, together with vim and Lisp), if you learn it well enough to be good at it, and early enough in your career- You really have a mad productivity work horse. Its really one of those things which save tons of time and effort. A bit like O(1) hack of the productivity world. Perhaps at the core of this just how many what we called regular programming tasks…
Sadly I think Node and Python have long taken over CPAN.
But apart from that, I was nodding through your whole comment… Perl really is a super power. POSIX at your fingertips!
Re: Half My Life with Perl
#5Perl is one of those power tools(as recommended in Let Over Lambda, together with vim and Lisp), if you learn it well enough to be good at it, and early enough in your career- You really have a mad productivity work horse. Its really one of those things which save tons of time and effort. A bit like O(1) hack of the productivity world. Perhaps at the core of this just how many what we called regular programming tasks…
Sadly I think Node and Python have long taken over CPAN. But apart from that, I was nodding through your whole comment… Perl really is a super power. POSIX at your fingertips!
Node/NPM definitely is on-par with CPAN. But pip isn't even close.
The real deal with Perl is you not only get bleeding stuff, you get all kind of obscure and rare libraries. Its not that you can't do that in Python. Its just that the culture in Python world isn't made up of people who think about those problems or even in that dimension. Its a great language for writing all variety of apps.
Perl is the og hacker's language. Python is awesome too, but its not really what Perl is.
Most of the bad rep Perl gets is because programmers who only interact with http endpoints and databases tend to not understand where else it could be useful.
Like even the regexes. They sound like a pain, until you have to do non trivial string manipulation tasks. Then you discover, regexes do it a lot better than cutting and slicing strings some 100s of times.
Re: Half My Life with Perl
#6Perl is one of those power tools(as recommended in Let Over Lambda, together with vim and Lisp), if you learn it well enough to be good at it, and early enough in your career- You really have a mad productivity work horse. Its really one of those things which save tons of time and effort. A bit like O(1) hack of the productivity world. Perhaps at the core of this just how many what we called regular programming tasks…
I’m into lisp and vim.
I did one small project with Perl but wasn’t excited. I was hoping for bash 2.0 but the shell integration wasn’t great. Seems like python is a similar feature set, less exotic, and has great libraries.
Anyway? What did I miss? anything I should take a second look at?
Re: Half My Life with Perl
#7Perl is one of those power tools(as recommended in Let Over Lambda, together with vim and Lisp), if you learn it well enough to be good at it, and early enough in your career- You really have a mad productivity work horse. Its really one of those things which save tons of time and effort. A bit like O(1) hack of the productivity world. Perhaps at the core of this just how many what we called regular programming tasks…
I’m into lisp and vim. I did one small project with Perl but wasn’t excited. I was hoping for bash 2.0 but the shell integration wasn’t great. Seems like python is a similar feature set, less exotic, and has great libraries. Anyway? What did I miss? anything I should take a second look at?
Raku is basically perl 6 and has some features that blew my mind when I tried it a few years back.
Never really did much with it, but it was enjoyable to learn.
Re: Half My Life with Perl
#8Perl is one of those power tools(as recommended in Let Over Lambda, together with vim and Lisp), if you learn it well enough to be good at it, and early enough in your career- You really have a mad productivity work horse. Its really one of those things which save tons of time and effort. A bit like O(1) hack of the productivity world. Perhaps at the core of this just how many what we called regular programming tasks…
Just curious, what does Perl give you over Ruby if anything? I learned Ruby first, always heard it was strongly inspired by Perl (as well as Smalltalk), and it provides all the benefits you mentioned, I think.
Re: Half My Life with Perl
#9Earlier quoted context omitted.
Sadly I think Node and Python have long taken over CPAN. But apart from that, I was nodding through your whole comment… Perl really is a super power. POSIX at your fingertips!
Node/NPM definitely is on-par with CPAN. But pip isn't even close. The real deal with Perl is you not only get bleeding stuff, you get all kind of obscure and rare libraries. Its not that you can't do that in Python. Its just that the culture in Python world isn't made up of people who think about those problems or even in that dimension. Its a great language for writing all variety of apps. Perl is the og hacker's l…
I'll be frank: I think this idea that ${faveLang} is for misunderstood geniuses who truly understand computers where mainstream languages like Python are for dunces who only know how to glue together APIs is a large part of why such languages as Perl are nearing extinction. It turns out that there are people working on challenging problems in domains you've never heard of in Python -- and pretty much every other language. Give it a rest
In the real world, the ability of a lone genius to cobble together a script in an hour is actually not that much of an edge -- it is more important for people to write something that others can understand and maintain. If you can do that in Perl, great, and if writing Perl makes you happy: also great. But beware that smug elitism turns people off, it kills communities and also tends to signal a pathological inversion of priorities. All this should be in service to people, after all
Re: Half My Life with Perl
#10I’m about to turn 40 and have been thinking if I should learn Perl or AWK or go with a “modern” solution for text wrangling on the command line.
The general advice here seems to be “learn Perl while young”