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Not Your Grandfather’s Perl

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Re: Not Your Grandfather’s Perl

#251

Post by forgotmypw17 »

theonething wrote: post #99
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…

>Bless you, Larry I see what you did there. Edit: for those downvoting me because they don't understand my comment, it refers to the fact that bless is function of the standard library to associate an object with a class. If you're downvoting me because you think it's a stupid and off topic comment, that is perfectly valid and acceptable to me.

Thanks for thinking me more clever than I may be.

It was a simple blessing, and perhaps a reference to this interview with Larry.

To me, the language creator's faith is one more reason to use it.

https://slashdot.org/story/28204

Re: Not Your Grandfather’s Perl

#252

Post by wainstead »

hannibalhorn wrote: post #135
alxmdev wrote: post #134

I think of Perl as a Python-PHP hybrid. A pragmatic product of its time that will endure, and while I'm grateful for never needing it, I'm glad that it's a solid option still for those who do.

Perl actually predates both of those!

I recall seeing my first PHP/FI page in the middle 90s. PHP was a godsend after you'd suffered with Apache's "server side includes" [0], which is largely what it was used to replace.

Python's origin was as a teaching language (originally ABC I think?), and thus the simplicity of the syntax. It was kinda cool that Python was around for so long before it took off... I had the O'Reilly Python book way back in the 90s.

Perl's influences were awk, sed, bash, C, Fortran, and Lisp.

[0] https://docstore.mik.ua/orelly/linux/apache/ch10_01.htm

Re: Not Your Grandfather’s Perl

#253

Post by TristanBall »

mgraczyk wrote: post #125

Spent about 4 weeks learning perl at an internship 10 years ago. I believe that is one of the biggest professional mistakes I ever made. There is literally nothing I would recommend doing with perl over python.

Four weeks learning a language was one of your biggest professional mistakes?

Really?

What were the repercussions of this terrible deed?

Re: Not Your Grandfather’s Perl

#254

Post by justinator »

cutler wrote: post #188
justinator wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Corinna is essentially the working spec of the new class system in Perl. I’m not sure being performant was ever the goal.

I think this is where Ruby's reputation for being slow is a bit misleading. Perl is faster because it doesn't have OOP baked-in. Pre-load Moose and Perl's performance isn't that different than Ruby's.

Honestly, I don't know, but I would assume Ruby's OO performance is better than Perl's with a very large extension (Moose), where some optimizations just aren't possible, given the core architecture of Perl, but I'm really getting above my pay grade in what I know about Perl internals (which is almost nothing, really, that's some scary looking stuff in there!).

I do look forward to the new class system coming to Perl based on Corrina, but I also can't comment on how performant it's going to be, either. My guess is that going ahead on this large project was based on answers to questions like, "is it going to be more useful than Moose?" "More performant?" Because if not, why not just use Moose?

Re: Not Your Grandfather’s Perl

#255

Post by mgraczyk »

TristanBall wrote: post #253
mgraczyk wrote: post #125

Spent about 4 weeks learning perl at an internship 10 years ago. I believe that is one of the biggest professional mistakes I ever made. There is literally nothing I would recommend doing with perl over python.

Four weeks learning a language was one of your biggest professional mistakes? Really ? What were the repercussions of this terrible deed?

I wasted the entire internship writing horrible perl code and not learning how to do anything that I would use later. This was early enough in my career that it had a lasting effect on my perception of software development and it took me 3+ years to get back "on track".

Re: Not Your Grandfather’s Perl

#256

Post by garfieldnate »

I'm surprised with the emphasis on new features that such old features were highlighted. The 'say' function was added in 2007. Signatures were added in 2014, though to be fair they didn't stop emitting an "experimental" warning until this latest release.

Re: Not Your Grandfather’s Perl

#257

Post by theonething »

forgotmypw17 wrote: post #251
theonething wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Bless you, Larry I see what you did there. Edit: for those downvoting me because they don't understand my comment, it refers to the fact that bless is function of the standard library to associate an object with a class. If you're downvoting me because you think it's a stupid and off topic comment, that is perfectly valid and acceptable to me.

Thanks for thinking me more clever than I may be. It was a simple blessing, and perhaps a reference to this interview with Larry. To me, the language creator's faith is one more reason to use it. https://slashdot.org/story/28204

My suspicion (not in a negative way as I'm Christian as well) is that the function was named so because of Larry's faith.
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