Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Not Your Grandfather’s Perl

stackoverflow.blog

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

11–20 of 257 posts

Re: Not Your Grandfather’s Perl

#11

Post by arthurcolle »

forgotmypw17 wrote: post #4

With function signatures and state variables added in 5.010, I consider Perl feature-complete and have not really missed anything from it for as long as I've been writing Perl. What I do appreciate that's missing from many other languages and systems is the extreme committment to backwards compatibility. The knowledge that the next minor release won't break existing scripts is underrated, IMO. Solo project with ~23K…

What is your project? Raku has some cool features and interesting syntax, I took a look at it before the rename, but find myself reaching for Python for basically everything.

Re: Not Your Grandfather’s Perl

#12

Post by cestith »

superkuh wrote: post #5

I'd argue perl's major value is from stability in the sense that what the perl developers write today can be run on the perl available on any machine, new or old. If a lot of perl developers end up use'ing lots of these new features that feeling of compatiblity will go away.

If you need new code you write today to run on 20 year old systems, don't use the newer features. Perl 5.36 is backwards compatible to code written for Perl 5.6 after all. If you need 20 year old code to run on new machines, the same thing occurs - you hand it to a recent Perl 5 and it works. Compare and contrast the last 20 years of PHP or Python.

Re: Not Your Grandfather’s Perl

#13

Post by wistlo »

"Bare bones" seems to be a good thing for Perl. I use Strawberry Perl on Windows and it is orders of magnitude faster than Powershell for processing large files of text strings using regular expressions.

I hope the addition of a "new object-oriented programming framework" won't take away the "bare-bones" speed of the current release.

Re: Not Your Grandfather’s Perl

#14

Post by wistlo »

csdvrx wrote: post #3

Even on modern hardware with vectorization, the speed of perl is hard to match for stream processing. I write and deploy brand new perl code in 2022 to replace some clunky python and javascript - for real! AMA!

I'm working in Windows (employer's choice) and need to process some huge data files on the desktop.

Perl (Strawberry Perl for Windows) is much faster than native Powershell (or CMD) scripts. A few Perl one-liners and I have 2 GB processed in a couple of minutes.

Big fan of Perl here.

Re: Not Your Grandfather’s Perl

#16

Post by anthk »

wistlo wrote: post #13

"Bare bones" seems to be a good thing for Perl. I use Strawberry Perl on Windows and it is orders of magnitude faster than Powershell for processing large files of text strings using regular expressions. I hope the addition of a "new object-oriented programming framework" won't take away the "bare-bones" speed of the current release.

Perl's bindings for Win32 and OLE are amazing.

Re: Not Your Grandfather’s Perl

#17

Post by duskwuff »

forgotmypw17 wrote: post #4

With function signatures and state variables added in 5.010, I consider Perl feature-complete and have not really missed anything from it for as long as I've been writing Perl. What I do appreciate that's missing from many other languages and systems is the extreme committment to backwards compatibility. The knowledge that the next minor release won't break existing scripts is underrated, IMO. Solo project with ~23K…

Signatures were added in 5.020, and [edited:] were considered experimental until 5.036.

Re: Not Your Grandfather’s Perl

#18

Post by qsort »

csdvrx wrote: post #3

Even on modern hardware with vectorization, the speed of perl is hard to match for stream processing. I write and deploy brand new perl code in 2022 to replace some clunky python and javascript - for real! AMA!

What's the difference when compared with other scripting languages? Is it just all-around faster or it's about some particular application?

Re: Not Your Grandfather’s Perl

#19

Post by avyjit »

csdvrx wrote: post #3

Even on modern hardware with vectorization, the speed of perl is hard to match for stream processing. I write and deploy brand new perl code in 2022 to replace some clunky python and javascript - for real! AMA!

When you refer to modern hardware with vectorization, are you saying perl beats software that makes use of vector instructions? If so wow! Afaik perl is a plain old interpreted language with no JIT, what makes it so fast? I had an idea of perl as in the same performance category as Python, Ruby and friends.

Re: Not Your Grandfather’s Perl

#20

Post by anthk »

wistlo wrote: post #14
csdvrx wrote: post #3

Even on modern hardware with vectorization, the speed of perl is hard to match for stream processing. I write and deploy brand new perl code in 2022 to replace some clunky python and javascript - for real! AMA!

I'm working in Windows (employer's choice) and need to process some huge data files on the desktop. Perl (Strawberry Perl for Windows) is much faster than native Powershell (or CMD) scripts. A few Perl one-liners and I have 2 GB processed in a couple of minutes. Big fan of Perl here.

Perl is the Unix utilities' replacement for Windows. It can do awk/sed in one place.

What I miss it's a "strings(1)" replacement for Perl.

Post reply on HN