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Perl, the first postmodern computer language (1999)

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

#211

Post by random_cynic »

hzhou321 wrote: post #206
random_cynic wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> People still trying to revive Perl against modern fad, for example, Python. Lmao Python has been around since 1991 only three years after Perl appeared. How's it a fad? Sucess of python is a testament to the difference a simple and beginner-friendly syntax can make as well as the "batteries-included" paradigm. Most people don't realize how much of a difference these things make especially in removing the initial ba…

> Lmao Python has been around since 1991 only three years after Perl appeared. How's it a fad? If everyone start wearing pink this year, that's a fad. A fad has nothing to do with when the stuff was invented. It only has to do with people choosing it from the dominant reason being other people chooses it. > Sucess of python is a testament to the difference a simple and beginner-friendly syntax can make as well as the…

> A fad has nothing to do with when the stuff was invented. It only has to do with people choosing it from the dominant reason being other people chooses it.

If that's your interpretation of a fad then you're still wrong. The dominant reason why people choose Python is the strong ecosystems that have been built around it - everything from scientific computing, data analysis, machine learning, web frameworks and so on. This happened over decades. And it's no coincidence why so many good libraries have been written in Python. All of their creators have publicly admitted they loved Python syntax, wanted to code in Python and nothing else in their jobs even if it means having to write a whole different library. And because Python has so low threshold for beginners, these caught on fairly quickly and took over. Python core developers listend to the community and quickly adapted to their needs. Meanwhile Perl gods buried their heads in their pursuit of the most perfect programming language ever - and we all know how that turned out.

> So why Python didn't succeed when Perl dominated?

Who said it didn't succeed? It's growth was just slower than Perl. It was slowly building up steam. While Perl exploded and ran out of fuel in 10 years.

> Do not write scripts the way we write shell scripts.

This has nothing to do with writing new scripts. Read my comment again. This is about maintaining/adapting legacy code from 10-20 years back. In 90% of the cases for Perl that means a complete rewrite because there's no point spending time understanding the gibberish. I can't really go back in time and tell those people to write good code or be "good practitioners". And if I have to do a rewrite now, there's absolutely no reason to choose Perl, that ship sailed in early 2000s.

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

#212

Post by eternityforest »

I think this is a pretty great analysis of what's wrong with modernism(Which is unfortunately coming back), the part I disagree with is programmer creativity and "There is more than one way to do it" thinking.

The current crop of popular languages does it really well. They aren't designed starting from any kind of simple theoretical construct like stacks or lisps or machine code, but they do always watch your back and prevent many unsafe(Unsafe in the sense that they allow common mistakes that are hard to detect automatically) constructs, while providing equally easy constructs.

A lot of the value in moving away from modernist thinking is that you actually have fewer concepts to work with. In programming, the usual goal of minimalism is to let you build exactly what you need.

Since you're building it yourself as you go, the language effectively has every imaginable feature, minus any syntactic sugar for any of them. I suppose that's where the idea that all projects eventually include half of common lisp comes from.

Perl's rich but predefined set of language and syntax features was a wonderful advancement, but other languages have since combined that with a lot more safety and opinionatedness.

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

#213

Post by collyw »

anthk wrote: post #4
tokai wrote: post #2

The author misunderstood what postmodern is. It is not the next epoch after modernism.

Saying that to a lingüist it's... interesting. On Perl, CPAN was and it's still amazing, and lots of stuff came from that. For example, Mojolicious for the web, BioPerl for bioinformatics and Rivescript to write silly chatbots, among others. Oh, and pkg_* under OpenBSD. INB4 gen-z's rant on "PeRl It'S UnRead@ble", check the intro from "perldoc perlintro". EDIT: Unless I'm sure the deleted link it's right, I'd avoid p…

I am pretty sure that the human genome project was more responsible for BioPerl than CPAN was.

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

#214

Post by collyw »

fps_doug wrote: post #14
anthk wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Saying that to a lingüist it's... interesting. On Perl, CPAN was and it's still amazing, and lots of stuff came from that. For example, Mojolicious for the web, BioPerl for bioinformatics and Rivescript to write silly chatbots, among others. Oh, and pkg_* under OpenBSD. INB4 gen-z's rant on "PeRl It'S UnRead@ble", check the intro from "perldoc perlintro". EDIT: Unless I'm sure the deleted link it's right, I'd avoid p…

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.…

I don't think that the problem is unique to Perl, but Perl syntax can make the problem so much worse.

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

#215

Post by collyw »

chasd00 wrote: post #75
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.…

iirc Perl was always described as the "duct tape of the internet" which encompasses the good and bad sides of Perl.

https://xkcd.com/224/

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

#216

Post by collyw »

cestith wrote: post #6
anthk wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Saying that to a lingüist it's... interesting. On Perl, CPAN was and it's still amazing, and lots of stuff came from that. For example, Mojolicious for the web, BioPerl for bioinformatics and Rivescript to write silly chatbots, among others. Oh, and pkg_* under OpenBSD. INB4 gen-z's rant on "PeRl It'S UnRead@ble", check the intro from "perldoc perlintro". EDIT: Unless I'm sure the deleted link it's right, I'd avoid p…

Please don't post links to pirated content.

Stop pushing your own moral values onto others.

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

#217

Post by mvhvv »

hzhou321 wrote: post #205
mvhvv wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I sympathise with your desire to replace shell scripts, but I don't see why that replacement should be Perl of all things. Like you said, Python has displaced Perl due to ecosystem support, so why chase history here?

Python never succeeded in scripting. Shell still dominates scripting today. Perl is rooted in scripting.

Where do you think Python has failed as a scripting language? I'm not very familiar with Perl, but overall I can't think of any obvious advantages aside from some of the syntactic sugar around invoking shell commands and string matching.

I can see stability as a knock against Python, but outside of 2 vs 3 the only breaking changes I've really had to deal with were relatively short term issues with third party libs.

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

#218

Post by bmn__ »

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…

Factual sources:

https://gist.github.com/Grinnz/be5db6b1d54b22d8e21c975d68d7a...

https://github.com/Perl/perl5/wiki/Perl7-FAQ

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

#219

Post by bmn__ »

SOLAR_FIELDS wrote: post #146
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…

Curious - is there a reason to use Perl (Wall's latest version, 5 or whatever) in 2022 if one has no familiarity with the language? What would be the major advantage of using Perl over its closest analogues, some bastardization of Bash and Python?

* Unicode's high hanging fruits implemented competently and correctly

* not grinding a theoretical axe against the user

* language changeable at run-time to some degree, so stealing new ideas from other languages and keeping up with advancements in PLT can be and is done by end users, not only the maintainers

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

#220

Post by cafard »

DonHopkins wrote: post #116
mproud wrote: post #37

Perl is the sexiest programming language because “there’s more than one way to do it.”

At first glance I thought you wrote "Perl is the sexist programming language because..." https://geekfeminism.fandom.com/wiki/Perl_is_my_bitch >Perl is my bitch was a slogan used by the London Perl Mongers (a Perl user group) and printed on t-shirts ca. 2000. https://geekfeminism.fandom.com/wiki/Acme::Playmate_talk >At the Open Source Developers Conference in Melbourne in December 2006, Perl community member Adam Ken…

None of this is good, all of this is new to me. And none of it has anything to do with why I have ever used Perl.
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