I can't imagine programming in any other programming language than Perl.
The Joy of Perl (1998)
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Re: The Joy of Perl (1998)
#12I can't imagine programming in any other programming language than Perl.
I can’t imagine programming in Perl anymore. I did a bit in a previous job and it was a ball ache trying to remember the syntax and all it’s quirks.
I don’t know why you’d want to use it over other popular scripting languages like JS/Ruby/Python. All have more active communities.
AWS don’t even support Perl
Re: The Joy of Perl (1998)
#13I can't imagine programming in any other programming language than Perl.
I can’t imagine programming in Perl anymore. I did a bit in a previous job and it was a ball ache trying to remember the syntax and all it’s quirks. I don’t know why you’d want to use it over other popular scripting languages like JS/Ruby/Python. All have more active communities. AWS don’t even support Perl
Some workers complains about their tools.
Other just use whatever, fix problems, and make money.
Re: The Joy of Perl (1998)
#14I can't imagine programming in any other programming language than Perl.
I can’t imagine programming in Perl anymore. I did a bit in a previous job and it was a ball ache trying to remember the syntax and all it’s quirks. I don’t know why you’d want to use it over other popular scripting languages like JS/Ruby/Python. All have more active communities. AWS don’t even support Perl
Non-web developer here... I've personally never seen any Ruby in anything I've ever worked on (only personal, limited anecdote, of course).
Python's nice for gluing more performant native code together (perl XS isn't as straightforward IME). But for text processing I'll take perl every time.
Re: The Joy of Perl (1998)
#15Earlier quoted context omitted.
I can’t imagine programming in Perl anymore. I did a bit in a previous job and it was a ball ache trying to remember the syntax and all it’s quirks. I don’t know why you’d want to use it over other popular scripting languages like JS/Ruby/Python. All have more active communities. AWS don’t even support Perl
Non-web developer here... I've personally never seen any Ruby in anything I've ever worked on (only personal, limited anecdote, of course). Python's nice for gluing more performant native code together (perl XS isn't as straightforward IME). But for text processing I'll take perl every time.
Ruby definitely has its niche in web development mainly due to Rails, Jekyll and Sinatra. Quite a weird choice for other things. Pretty sure Homebrew on Mac uses it.
It’s not the most performant of languages (although it’s definitely getting better).
Re: The Joy of Perl (1998)
#16I can't imagine programming in any other programming language than Perl.
That's kinda sad.
Re: The Joy of Perl (1998)
#17Earlier quoted context omitted.
Non-web developer here... I've personally never seen any Ruby in anything I've ever worked on (only personal, limited anecdote, of course). Python's nice for gluing more performant native code together (perl XS isn't as straightforward IME). But for text processing I'll take perl every time.
Ruby definitely has its niche in web development mainly due to Rails, Jekyll and Sinatra. Quite a weird choice for other things. Pretty sure Homebrew on Mac uses it. It’s not the most performant of languages (although it’s definitely getting better).
Homebrew is the only thing I think Ruby is perfect for. It's just a DSL for describing how to fetch and build a program, like Makefiles but more convenient.
Re: The Joy of Perl (1998)
#18Earlier quoted context omitted.
In those days "real programmers" were doing C and ASM, and they anyway considered all other languages as a joke :P
Kernigan didn't! The number of little languages he made is astounding.
The "unix way" was full of small languages, sometimes compiled to C.
There's a good reason why parser generators were part of UNIX.
Re: The Joy of Perl (1998)
#19Used to spend a ton of time writing Perl (see username). Moved on to better designed languages. Which are not hard to find.
There are a few big issues with Perl 5 but the biggest is easily the mess of references vs flat values. Python, Ruby, JavaScript and many other dynamic languages do not make the programmer think about whether you are going to pass a data structure like an array or hash as a reference or direct value. Perl does. A lot of built in operators expect direct values, eg array ops like join, push. This is because the ops existed before Perl added complex data structures — arrays of arrays, hashes of arrays, etc. References were bolted on in Perl 5 to support such structures. And any code using them will handle references not direct values. So you have a split. And then a lot of energy is spent navigating between these two types of variables.
As Steve Yegge said:
“Perl's references are basically pointers. As in, C-style pointers. You know. Addresses. Machine addresses. What in the flip-flop are machine addresses doing in a "very high-level language (VHLL)", might you ask? Well, gosh, what they're doing is taking up about 30% of the space in all Perl documentation worldwide.”
https://sites.google.com/site/steveyegge2/ancient-languages-...
For a taste of this here is how you join an array inside a hash:
join(‘,’,@{$foo->{‘bar’}})
Update - I forgot to say my favorite thing about Perl. The CPAN community. People talk about the sheer scale of CPAN but my favorite thing about it is the quality of documentation, at least back when I was using it. Really good uniform high quality docs. Almost always a great synopsis with multiple good examples covering real uses cases and gotchas. Then thorough documentation of functions/methods. My theory is this culture developed because CPAN predates StackOverflow, github, Google, maybe even search engines. The docs had to be good.
Re: The Joy of Perl (1998)
#20After I first got online in 1995, I had noticed that Perl was this thing that everyone was using to create dynamic HTTP server behavior. I ended up using what I knew instead: Turbo Pascal + some oddball "wincgi" interface. Later I caved and started using Perl, since everyone else was using it. It was a pretty weird experience. I did my first paid "consulting", for a company from the tiny place where I grew up, buildi…
14 years later (2011) I ended up visiting/working with a team that had stayed with Perl for some time. That was a fascinating experience. They were using selected "good" parts of Perl, sort of how you can can use the good parts of any competent dynamic programming language and stay productive, in a small team. Afaik they're still going strong.