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

191–200 of 257 posts

Re: Not Your Grandfather’s Perl

#191

Post by cutler »

michaelwww wrote: post #140
heresie-dabord wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Perl has a painful syntax, Python greatly improves on this with easy syntax. I use Python and Perl. Some people who like Python want everything to be Python and "hate" anything that isn't Python. It approaches zealotry in some cases. Perl syntax is expressive and is similar to C, C++, Java, and yes Bash. These are successful languages too despite not being pythonic .

I'd use PHP before I'd use PERL. PHP has experienced some dramatic improvements in the last 5 years

Sure, if you're a fan of Java verbosity. Since PHP 5.3 I don't know why Zend didn't just re-brand PHP as Java Lite. I also don't get why Rasmus allowed the Zend team to get away with it since at heart he's a procedural C guy.

Re: Not Your Grandfather’s Perl

#193

Post by petre »

HankB99 wrote: post #75

I've used Perl off and on throughout my career, even working at one job that was pretty much exclusively Perl. I've also used Java and C/C++. I've done a lot of work with embedded systems where C was the order of the day. But back to Perl. I always thought one of the best things about Perl was CPAN. I could nearly always find a module that would accomplish a specific task I needed and then I was just left to write th…

> nearly always find a module that would accomplish a specific task I needed

Then you didn't have to write PC/SC smartcard code in Perl. Also most of the MQTT clients are crap, only Net::MQTT::Message is useful but then you have to write the network client yourself and if you also need TLS, good luck, the modules doing that have like 200+ failed tests. CPAN is great but if you need anything out of the ordinary you'll probably find modules in a state of disrepair, abandoned in 2010.

Re: Not Your Grandfather’s Perl

#194

Post by leejo »

cutler wrote: post #185
thatwasunusual wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'm surprised CPAN is not mentioned. I wonder if it is still active. CPAN is indeed alive and kicking; https://metacpan.org/

The thing is back in the day 35,000 modules on CPAN was a big deal but if you look at https://modulecounts.com that's since been dwarfed by Python/PyPI (398,000), Ruby/Rubygems (173,000), PHP/Packagist (351,000) and JS/npm (2,116,000).

CPAN is still where the most interesting work is happening with Perl. Often blog posts like Dave's here will highlight features added to recent perl versions, which from outside the community looks pretty underwhelming. Probably it is, but that isn't as compelling as what you can get from outside the core.

While the core devs of perl concentrate on optimisation of the language and slowly add new features, the strong backwards compatibility approach constrains what can be done with it. The backwards compatibility is so important that development builds of the core will run against the entirety of CPAN's distributions' test suites to see if changes break anything there. This is know as "BBC" - blead breaks CPAN. If a change breaks something on CPAN then it needs to be reevaluated. I don't know if any other languages have an equivalent - running not just the internal test suite but also an enormous external one?

The nature of Perl means external modules can bend the language in some pretty interesting ways and build atop a strong foundation. The new features added to the language are slowly being used by more module authors to create features and libraries that are what you want to focus on.

See https://metacpan.org/pod/Task::Kensho for some of these.

Re: Not Your Grandfather’s Perl

#198

Post by klibertp »

arthurcolle wrote: post #11
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.

Raku is a really nice language. I especially like the features that improve safety of the code: gradual typing, subsets, PRE and POST conditions, and defined/undefined checks. Junctions and multimethods are also nice. I have an article - not finished, and probably won't ever finish it, unfortunately - showcasing these features: https://klibert.pl/statics/raku/writeup.html

I think Raku deserves way more attention. Its implementation is suboptimal in many ways and it's improving slowly due to very small core team. With more exposure, more people would come, and hopefully some of them would consider contributing, accelerating the pace of development.

Re: Not Your Grandfather’s Perl

#199

Post by Toutouxc »

kqr wrote: post #52
stjohnswarts wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would argue that ruby as almost all the strengths of perl and conciseness with more coherency if you want a perl-like fluidity and terseness. I personally like python for anything that becomes more than a 100 lines of bash.

Does Ruby come pre-installed on virtually every Unix-like system out there?

Just a data point — Ruby, Perl and Python have all been deprecated [0] in macOS.

[0] https://developer.apple.com/documentation/macos-release-note...

Re: Not Your Grandfather’s Perl

#200

Post by wazoox »

gyulai wrote: post #170
lupire wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Perl makes easy things easy and hard things possible."

Getting strings to have the right encodings should be easy. On the last Perl codebase I touched it's proven impossible for all practical intents and purposes.

It's markedly easier than with Python, though. Here's a short script that will recode a file with mixed iso-8859-1 and utf8 data into proper utf8:

    #!/usr/bin/perl
    use strict;
    use warnings;
    
    use Encode qw( decode FB_QUIET );
    
    binmode STDIN, ':bytes';
    binmode STDOUT, ':encoding(UTF-8)';
    
    my $out;
    
    while (  ) {
        $out = '';
        while ( length ) {
            $out .= decode( "utf-8", $_, FB_QUIET );
            $out .= decode( "iso-8859-1", substr( $_, 0, 1 ), FB_QUIET ) if length;
        }
        print $out;
    }
Post reply on HN