161–170 of 573 posts
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Ruby really is Perl done right. I can't really see any argument for Perl over Ruby as a language.
use strict. In Perl you can prevent something like the following from compiling. You can't with Ruby (unless they've finally addressed that). $foo = 2; if (some_test()) { $fooo = 3; }
my $foo = 2;
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> You learn perl, and you've learned nothing but Larry Wall. Yes, this is why it's nice. You don't have to worship at the foot of an industry which slavishly tries to implement a misunderstanding of a system some dude made up 40 years ago to get around problems in other systems some other dudes made up before that. It's weird on purpose. And it's backwards-compatible-crufty on purpose. Today I can run Perl code writt…
Not a Microsoft fan, but simple C / Windows API code from 25 years ago would likely compile and run on Windows 10 unchanged. My limited experience with Swift suggests that even 25 hours ago could be a tall order...
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Ruby also has this.
Ruby really is Perl done right. I can't really see any argument for Perl over Ruby as a language.
One can write bad Perl, and I've written a lot.
One can write good Perl, and I've written some. It has saved me and others quite a lot of time on assorted projects.
These days I tend to use Python where once I'd have used Perl. This is mostly because I find that the young are far more likely to know Python than to know Perl. I will be retiring one of these days, after all.
will wait for actual release will try on some pet project
Are they still renaming Perl 6? I think it is a tad confusing to have 5 and 7 being so similar, and the 6 in between so radically different. I can't be the only one.
Perl 6 was renamed to Raku in October 2019.
I know some people aren't fans of Perl5, but it's what I learned and I wasn't all that excited to have to toss everything I knew (and my reference books) just because of a new version number. If Perl6 turns out to be complementary as people were saying/hoping, maybe Perl7 is where we get to see the interplay.
The largest issue I've had is that even though the ecosystem gives you the ability to write code resembling best practices, I don't see a lot of Perl programmers that do it. Coming onto a project it didn't make sense to catch a whole team up on 20 years of best practices. So I went about writing code that would never be accepted on most of my other teams.
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Many places don’t support antifragility. Having an old system that nobody wants to rewrite may not be a reflection on the engineers. You’re an expert, and a rewrite is going to expose you to a lot of scrutiny. You are going to break things, when maybe you haven’t broken things in a long time and people like it that way. So when some day arrives where a new fad is hot and it’s hard to impossible to find Perl programme…
There's no need to rewrite a system that works and that you're not gonna change. While programming languages go out of fashion there will always be people who are capable of writing them. The median age of a cobol programmer has not changed in 20 years because more people keep learning the language. Demand in this case, will likely create its own supply.
We shouldn't really be treating software differently. The liability for a mission critical system that works but cannot be repaired climbs over time.
Just because it works doesn't mean it isn't broken.
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Perl lost the war because it didn't turn-up for the battle. In the 2000s it went into a kind of COVID19 self-isolation phase. First there was Parrot - a half-assed attempt to create a CLR for dynamic languages. When that failed the MoarVM adventure began. There were about 3 implemetations of Perl6 in development simultaneously (MoarVM, JVM & Rakudo) as Perl5 hemorrhaged mindshare. All-in-all it took 15 years to produ…
Yeah, Perl 6 was certainly A Thing. I am not sure practicing Perl programmers cared much about it. I went to the talks and thought "neat" but it didn't really seem like "welp, this is taking forever, I'm switching to Python." Maybe if everyone working on Perl 6 decided to work on data science tooling instead, Perl would have "beaten" Python in that area and things would be different, but the world doesn't really work…
I have used Perl since the Perl 4 days. One can write bad Perl, and I've written a lot. One can write good Perl, and I've written some. It has saved me and others quite a lot of time on assorted projects. These days I tend to use Python where once I'd have used Perl. This is mostly because I find that the young are far more likely to know Python than to know Perl. I will be retiring one of these days, after all.
I would add that Perl is still the best for one liners since you don't need to "import" key packages to do basic work e.g. you can regexes in a Perl one liner with no imports.