261–270 of 463 posts
I find Perl 5 best for the kinds of fire-and-forget text processing scripts that are a bit too complicated for awk but not involved enough to bring in a "real" language. It's a double-edged sword - in a throwaway script it's awesome to not have to bother converting between the number 12 and the string "12", both numeric and string operators will work on them the same way. In a large project that kind of thing is just…
Didn't CTAN predate CPAN?
This has been a huge deal for the Perl community. First, it was thought that Perl 6 would be the replacement for Perl 5. But it was long ago recognized that there was no clear upgrade path from Perl 5 to Perl 6, so it was agreed that Perl 6 was a "sister" language to Perl 5 rather than the successor. Except that many people expected that Perl 6 would be the replacement, so that stalled many projects. So an "alias" fo…
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Crystal is wonderful for one-off programs in my experience. Elixir had a long startup time for one-off scripts in my experience, but Elixir’s syntax is still one of my favorites for scripting.
Is a 100ms startup time really a big deal for something that is either going to be manually triggered or cronjobbed and expected to take on the order of minutes?
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I can't imagine scripting in Erlang. Or rather, I've seen it done and it wouldn't be my first choice. Elixir, on the other hand, has many nice features for scripting, such as better string handling, process pipe-lining, and an excellent set of first-class generic data structures (beyond just map and list). It also happens to have Erlang's fantastic concurrency model.
As a testament to this statement I wrote a Google maps API scraper to get a list of driving distances from a pair of csv tables - shortname + address and shortnames to and from, in about 1 hour, and the whole thing clocked in at 90 lines of code including about 40 lines of comments.
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I find programming perl fun inversely to program size and proportionally to the need to slice and dice text. I didn't learn perl until the perl 5 era, but from what I can tell, I would've been as satisfied with perl 4, before they bolted on OO and tried to expand the applicable problem domain of the language. I mostly just use it as a super-charged awk and bash replacement for scripting.
The bolted on OO is really just one new function...bless(). The rest is package namespaces, which are also used for non OO purposes. I'm never sure what people don't like about OO Perl. There's a tiny bit of boilerplate in a constructor, other than that, it doesn't seem different from other OO script languages.
It's just another example of Perl's biggest strength and weakness. Total freedom to build something amazing or shoot yourself in the foot.
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It certainly did not. System 6 (including MultiFinder if you had enough RAM to support it ;) was active for several years in the early 90s before System 7 came out. The label "MacOS", meanwhile, didn't show up until a few years after that.
Doh, yes, system 6 was current for quite a while. I wonder what other thing from that era I confused it with. I swear something around that time skipped a 6.
It seems Unix vendors really don't like low version numbers. Of course, Windows famously jumped from 3.x to 95, so it's not like they're any better.
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How familiar are you with Perl, and how much have you used it? Most of the anti-Perl comments I've heard have been from people who really didn't know it very well, if at all. Some of them might have glanced at some Perl code and saw a dense regex and dismissed it as "line noise". Well, yeah, if you don't know regexes you would be forgiven for thinking it was line noise, but if you did know regexes it should look no m…
>How familiar are you with Perl, and how much have you used it? It's what my company's entire code base is written in. So every hour of every work day for the past 6 months. >To me it looks really no uglier than any other mainstream language, and one could easily make the argument that any other mainstream language you care to name is uglier in some of its own ways. It's no one thing, but a bunch of little things tha…
That's a business culture thing. If you set the expectation, that it's okay to do that, people might do that. If you set the expectation that it's not okay, people shouldn't.
The equivalent C and Python are likely just as ugly (given that the equivalent python might be using a far too complex range statement or put it on a single line using : and ;, which is possible...).
That said, as bad code goes, that's not really that bad. The only non-standard things are and $_, and if you don't know what those are, you really haven't done the minimum of learning about the language ( might be somewhat exotic in that form depending on the codebase, but $_ is not something you can get way with not knowing about). In all, the major problem with it is that it's not commented and uses poor variable names, which is something every language needs to deal with. I would write it like so if I wanted it on a single line (but I would probably use 2-3 lines):
# Report each duplicated line once
my (%lineseen,@linedups); # This was required in yours too right? I assume you're using strict...
while () { (++$lineseen{$_}==2) && push(@linedups, $_); };
# Report duplicate lines once
my %lineseen;
my @linedups = grep { ++$lineseen{$_}==2 } ();
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Ovid2 said Perl6 has a good concurrency model lliamander replied that Elixir does too and it's worth a look To that, 7thaccount replied that Perl6 and Elixir fill different niches. So far, it seems Perl6 fills a niche that requires scripting and first-class concurrency. My question then is: what is this niche that requires very solid concurrency but also scripting. In other words, what does Perl6 have in terms of con…
Does Python 3 have any operators that transform ordinary method calls into concurrent method calls? Perl 6/Raku does.
edit: that is, as far as I can tell, after a quick Google, it's not too different from Python's Thread object.
This has been a huge deal for the Perl community. First, it was thought that Perl 6 would be the replacement for Perl 5. But it was long ago recognized that there was no clear upgrade path from Perl 5 to Perl 6, so it was agreed that Perl 6 was a "sister" language to Perl 5 rather than the successor. Except that many people expected that Perl 6 would be the replacement, so that stalled many projects. So an "alias" fo…
> Larry has now agreed with the change and Perl 6 will be renamed to "raku" and Perl 5, which has regular, major releases every year, will now be able to simply be "Perl" and be free to continue on its own way. I hope that doesn't mean that when Perl needs a major number version change again, they'll chose 6. It would be pretty confusing to have 2 Perl 6.