Perl is 26 Today • Hacker News Board

Re: Perl is 26 Today

#191

Post by bonemachine » Fri, Dec 20, 2013, 9:29 PM UTC

garrettdreyfus wrote: post #184

bonemachine wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unfortunately -- and this is one of the many "banana peels" in Perl 5 -- even a simple statement like print x if x > 5 is problematic in p5 for a whole bunch of reasons: (1) At a bare minimum, what you really need to say is: print "$x\n" if $x > 5; That extra "\n" is a definite turn-off to a lot of people when the get their very first look at Perl. Really, the default these days should be more "say"-like. Of course,…

Rookie mistake missing those $. I think that python is different. One of the advantages of Perl for me is that it's more forgiving.This can suck sometimes especially if your trying to keep your code error proof. I've programmed for 3 years now. Its heavily impacted my thoughts. Often when giving directions I'll find myself self slipping into python pseudocode, "if you see the store turn right" or "while your on this…

Slight correction: the "missing" $ were from the original post, and as I understood from the context at the time, were meant as pseudo-code.

Now, as to the fact that sigils basically don't bring all that much to Perl, are weird and distracting to newcomers and at the end of the day create as many problems as they solve... let's not go there, for now.

Re: Perl is 26 Today

#192

Post by collyw » Fri, Dec 20, 2013, 10:27 PM UTC

arunix wrote: post #111

mxey wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Dancer or Mojolicious are more like Sinatra or Flask, not like Rails or Django

Indeed. Perl does have Jifty and Gantry which do have out of the box support for the M part of MVC, but for whatever reasons they never became as popular as Django/Rails.

I tried Jifty, but Django documentation is way better for a beginner to web frameworks.

Re: Perl is 26 Today

#193

Post by collyw » Fri, Dec 20, 2013, 11:18 PM UTC

Mithaldu wrote: post #146

arca_vorago wrote: post #116

My favorite perl story: Had been working on parsing through huge flat text files with it, had over 40 lines going and just could not get it to work correctly. I took a step back, rethought what I was trying to do, and wrote a one liner awk that just worked. Side note: I have noticed that in bioinformatics, perl is largely being replaced with python in tool usage.

> I have noticed that in bioinformatics, perl is largely being replaced with python in tool usage. Which has honestly little to do with the language and more with the fact that the bioinformatics-related Perl books are the worst programming teaching books i have ever seen. (Honestly, a lot of the flak on perl goes back to old and outdated books.)

Maybe that explains why some (all actually) of the really bad code have seen has been from Bioinfomaticians. I have seen terrible code in both Perl and Python though.

Re: Perl is 26 Today

#194

Post by danellis » Sun, Dec 22, 2013, 11:58 PM UTC

SwellJoe wrote: post #130

danellis wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe, for the modules that build and actually have useful documentation. That seemed to me to be depressingly uncommon.

What platform are you on? I can't remember the last time I tried to install a module on a modern Linux distribution and had problems with it. Docs might be weaker than I'd like in some cases, mostly because of not enough examples (the curse of most documentation, IMHO). I don't develop on Windows or Mac, since I work on server-side software, so I might just be blissfully ignorant of a serious problem.

Linux. I think the most recent example (by which I mean about two years ago; I don't use Perl much) was trying to get the XML Signature modules to build. I gave up in the end.

The documentation for those was poor. I remember the documentation for Moose being poor, as well as the documentation for Catalyst being especially bad.