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Perl, the first postmodern computer language (1999)

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Re: Perl, the first postmodern computer language (1999)

#191

Post by collyw »

jkh1 wrote: post #59

Perl was the first language I used professionally and I used it almost exclusively for years. I don't understand all the negative comments about its use of sigils, I find them useful and I never got the impression that they made the code less readable but maybe that's because I was never taught the gospel of computer science :) I also appreciate the extended backwards compatibility. I still occasionally run decade-ol…

Sigils look ugly but they do offer you more information than languages without. Someone described them as a mini hungarian notation.

Re: Perl, the first postmodern computer language (1999)

#192

Post by fps_doug »

doomvox wrote: post #157
fps_doug wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm more than two decades away from being gen-z, and I still agree with that sentiment. There might be that theoretical wise and disciplined Perl programmer writing well structured and readable code, but wherever I interfaced with people writing/maintaining Perl code, it was the most hastily thrown together crap that once was a small tool that "just worked" and then slowly grew completely out of hands over the years.…

"... but wherever I interfaced with people writing/maintaining Perl code, it was the most hastily thrown together crap" The badly written stuff needs more "maintenance", and the people who need to work on it are more likely to complain (and I think you're stuck on confirmation bias). In the late-90s, the early web gold rush was on, and a lot of amateurs started writing perl in a hurry as their first language. The fac…

I think my comment kinda agrees with this, maybe I didn't make it clear enough though. You can write good or bad code in any language. But because of this, a low barrier to entry is both a blessing and a curse. And as time passes, and the more people touch the code, the higher the chances you end up with something cursed.

So my aversion to Perl could be considered a pragmatic solution to that problem. :-)

Re: Perl, the first postmodern computer language (1999)

#193

Post by popcube »

richard_todd wrote: post #174
doomvox wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, there's certainly a deprecation cycle in play, and some things may be on their way out that I would rather see kept around (e.g. they seem to have given up on getting the case statement-- given/when-- working: it's tough to do it right without built-in types), but seriously you seem to be behind-the-times on how the project is being managed. If they implement a version 7.0 scheme again, I guarantee they'll do i…

Hopefully you are right about all of this. I don't follow it closely, but when I periodically check in on nntp.perl.org I get the feeling they have no idea what to do about v7 anymore. Since they have to say _something_, currently they say they have no concrete plans but won't change defaults. We will see. Feature bundles don't bother me, but if I read between the lines (possibly too much), comments they make seem li…

last time, I saw they say perl 7 will waiting for some features finishing, e.g., new OOP system in core

Re: Perl, the first postmodern computer language (1999)

#194

Post by throwaway2037 »

throwaway2037 wrote: post #179
doomvox wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, Larry Wall's latest project was called "Perl 6" but has been renamed "Raku"-- in belated recognition that it really is a new language, and Perl is going to continue being Perl. The main reason to learn Raku at present is simply that it's profoundly different from most other things out there-- there's no particular "killer app" that's emerged for it, but it's unusual enough that this might happen yet (no one exp…

Thank you to provide 1, 2, 3 above. I didn't know about these! I am surprised you didn't mention Perl 11 which is try to mash Perl 5 and 6/Raku together. Is that still happening? Or do I have it wrong? "How Perl compares to Python": The first thing I tell Perl programmers who are starting to learn Python: There are Perl-style references in Python. (If you are not familiar with Perl: These are a roughly pointers, and…

Sorry, I cannot edit. I meant to say: There are no Perl-style references in Python.

Re: Perl, the first postmodern computer language (1999)

#195

Post by collyw »

leadingthenet wrote: post #82
hedora wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One thing I like about the sigils is that they make bad ideas hard to type. Want to pass me a hashtable of lambdas that return arrays of alternating functions and regexps? Go ahead. Show me how to invoke it. I'm waitng. Python (which has all of the type safety and expressivity of perl) allows such abominations to hide behind clean looking syntax. Sigils also improve readability. Bad Perl looks like serial port noise.…

> Bad Python looks like good python. Never used Perl, so I can't really make an honest comparison. I do use Python at work, though, and I can assure you that is FAR from being true. In fact, I think this is so untrue that I urge you to check out essentially any code written in academia (especially projects involving numeric computation and data science). If you come back and make that same statement with a straight f…

I have had colleagues (in academia) asking me to correct their unindented (or very badly indented code) in Perl. You couldn't actually do that ion Python.

Re: Perl, the first postmodern computer language (1999)

#196

Post by stefantalpalaru »

scruple wrote: post #106
forgotmypw17 wrote: post #35

I love Perl. I use almost none of its more esoteric features, and just write "classic procedural" code, mostly using command-line utilities instead of third-party modules for anything I don't want to write myself (mainly cryptography), and I am so fucking happy not having to deal with breaking changes in my language, a rare quality these days. I used a machine with a 9-year-old distro on it for a few months, and all…

I only touched Perl a little bit, at the start of my career in the mid-to-late 00s. I didn't hate it. For our specific use case, which was generating reports from large groups of text-based log files, it was wonderful. I'm curious, though, do you have any Perl programs you've worked on recently that are public? I'd love to take a look at how people are writing Perl these days...

No post body was provided.

Re: Perl, the first postmodern computer language (1999)

#197

Post by leadingthenet »

collyw wrote: post #195
leadingthenet wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Bad Python looks like good python. Never used Perl, so I can't really make an honest comparison. I do use Python at work, though, and I can assure you that is FAR from being true. In fact, I think this is so untrue that I urge you to check out essentially any code written in academia (especially projects involving numeric computation and data science). If you come back and make that same statement with a straight f…

I have had colleagues (in academia) asking me to correct their unindented (or very badly indented code) in Perl. You couldn't actually do that ion Python.

> You couldn't actually do that in Python

...and people endlessly complain about it to this day.

Re: Perl, the first postmodern computer language (1999)

#198

Post by SideburnsOfDoom »

bmn__ wrote: post #131
SideburnsOfDoom wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> arrays of alternating functions and regexps many languages will allow you to succinctly express the concept of "the type of this element is a or b" e.g. typescript: https://www.typescriptlang.org/docs/handbook/2/everyday-type... Rust: https://doc.rust-lang.org/book/ch06-01-defining-an-enum.html F# : https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/fsharp/language-refe... IDK, allowing that kind of type to be declared seems…

You have misunderstood GP. Alternating functions and regexps looks like this: [\&some_function, qr/some_regex/, \&another_function, qr/another_regex/] This is distinct from the idea of sum types.

Oh, I get that their example said _alternating_ function and regex. If that's the real requirement then they shouldn't be _alternating_ in the list at all, there should be a list of (function, regex) tuples. We don't need an example of tuples, they're even more widespread than sum types / unions / enums.

So the design as stated is very contrived, to the point where it doesn't make sense, but existing constructs can be used to make sense of it with a change one way or the other.

Re: Perl, the first postmodern computer language (1999)

#199

Post by forgotmypw17 »

petdance wrote: post #148
forgotmypw17 wrote: post #35

I love Perl. I use almost none of its more esoteric features, and just write "classic procedural" code, mostly using command-line utilities instead of third-party modules for anything I don't want to write myself (mainly cryptography), and I am so fucking happy not having to deal with breaking changes in my language, a rare quality these days. I used a machine with a 9-year-old distro on it for a few months, and all…

> I use almost none of its more esoteric features Which features do you see as esoteric?

To me, it means features which would not be obvious to me in their function coming from a PHP/C/VB/Java background.

I typically write code which I can (and do) copy and paste into PHP almost without changes. (I use PHP as both webserver glue and for duplicating functionality so that I can have two copies of the same code to validate against each other.)

I've also started adding some Python to my project and developed a very similar style in Python, using commented curly braces to reduce the code's brittleness.

Re: Perl, the first postmodern computer language (1999)

#200

Post by dc-programmer »

doomvox wrote: post #156
dc-programmer wrote: post #10

Meta-modernism was a mistake

Maybe you're thinking of slashdot.

This was a low effort comment on my part. I was mostly lamenting the end of the postmodern aesthetic, which gave us artifacts like Perl. Now we have meta-modernism, giving us the cultural current of affinity to coercion
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