181–190 of 463 posts
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> Sure but there's a reason that development has moved off of Perl. Why don't you specify this single reason you allude to?
Its a saying, but since you're being pedantic I'll use my personal favorite example -> Having to use mod_perl or cgi/fcgi is awful.
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Perl5 -> Perl6 has been highly contentious. Perl6 is basically a different language much to the chagrin of many Perl users. A lot of Perl users are entrenched in Perl5. FWIW: I'm unclear why people continue to use Perl at all, I moved on in 2011.
> FWIW: I'm unclear why people continue to use Perl at all, I moved on in 2011. Because it works. Scripts/software that works does not experience bit rot. As long as it works, people will continue to use it. Edit: OK, fine. It seems the downvoters are convinced that the code does in fact experience bit rot, and spoils with time. Probably like fish.
As a counterpoint, I think we can both agree that writing production software in one of the toy languages that pops up on HN frontpage every day is a bad idea. Writing in a language that is old enough that it has become niche has many of the same issues. It doesn't really matter whether the software is poorly understood because the language is new enough to be niche or old enough to be niche; the outcome is the same.
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Its a saying, but since you're being pedantic I'll use my personal favorite example -> Having to use mod_perl or cgi/fcgi is awful.
Most people who develop web stuff with Python end up using FCGI/WSGI to use with nginx anyway, so I'm not sure what this complaint means.
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> Sure but there's a reason that development has moved off of Perl. Why don't you specify this single reason you allude to?
Its a saying, but since you're being pedantic I'll use my personal favorite example -> Having to use mod_perl or cgi/fcgi is awful.
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It's not uncommon to leap frog versions in such cases. PHP went from 5 to 7, for instance.
Yeah there was also no ecmascript 4, it went from es3 to 5 because 4 was abandoned as too complex.
"after DirectX 3 was released, Microsoft began developing versions 4 and 5 at the same time. Version 4 was to be a shorter-term release with small features, whereas version 5 would be a more substantial release. The lack of interest from game developers in the features stated for DirectX 4 resulted in it being shelved, and the corpus of documents that already distinguished the two new versions resulted in Microsoft choosing to not re-use version 4 to describe features intended for version 5."
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A lot of my colleagues in NLP and text processing still prefer to write in Perl. Granted they are mostly the old guard but it is prevalent in academic language technology research.
Spacy, the new kid on the block, is in python...
For instance, [1] is a tool for text-to-pictograph translation system I worked on. The core engine is entirely written in Perl 5.
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Had they done it fifteen years earlier, I think Perl could have been the language to learn for Data Science. It still is a fantastic language to slice, clean up, and extract information from text files, and it was already very widely used in bioinformatics.
I don't think the name change was the problem here, rather it wasn't complete until recently.
Even if Perl 6 is completed, I don't think it is a practical workhorse for many real world situations.
To me being able to create grammars in Perl 6 to parse text data sounds really compelling. However, every time I have played around with them, Perl 6 has been so slow, that I have reverted to using regular expressions in another language.
I'm amazed that Perl is still around. I personally find it the least readable language that I've ever used, and that includes a lot of languages. But some people really seem to love it, for reasons a bit beyond me.
How familiar are you with Perl, and how much have you used it? Most of the anti-Perl comments I've heard have been from people who really didn't know it very well, if at all. Some of them might have glanced at some Perl code and saw a dense regex and dismissed it as "line noise". Well, yeah, if you don't know regexes you would be forgiven for thinking it was line noise, but if you did know regexes it should look no m…
It's what my company's entire code base is written in. So every hour of every work day for the past 6 months.
>To me it looks really no uglier than any other mainstream language, and one could easily make the argument that any other mainstream language you care to name is uglier in some of its own ways.
It's no one thing, but a bunch of little things that compound on top of each other. Until you get something like this:
while () { ($h{$_}++ == 1) && push (@outputarray, $_); };
Mostly though it's how it's used. It can technically do anything, so a lot of the times it is asked to do everything. Until one day you wake up to find you have hundreds of perl files, all tens of thousands of lines long, that all interconnect in an insane Object Oriented hierarchy soup stretching across every conceivable programming space - from database control to money processing to security to web site design.
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>including being one of the few dynamic languages with a working concurrency model... Elixir is worth a look. It's a pretty productive little language with a great concurrency model.
When someone says they want to work in Perl6/Raku, they likely have vastly different problems than someone using Erlang/Elixer. There is overlap of course (both general purpose), but I can't imagine using Erlang for scripting, while Raku is first class here.
Elixir, on the other hand, has many nice features for scripting, such as better string handling, process pipe-lining, and an excellent set of first-class generic data structures (beyond just map and list). It also happens to have Erlang's fantastic concurrency model.
I'm amazed that Perl is still around. I personally find it the least readable language that I've ever used, and that includes a lot of languages. But some people really seem to love it, for reasons a bit beyond me.