281–290 of 573 posts
Perl has these tiny neat features that I still miss in other languages. Like unless (opposite of if), and postfix syntax. print "It worked!\n" unless $error; print "Item: $_\n" foreach @items;
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Have you ever read O'Reilly's "Mastering Regular Expressions" by Friedl? He does a deep dive into the weird guts of regex modifiers. I was obsessed with that book one summer and wrote a bunch of parsers after learning incremental techniques (/o I think), and then 8 months later I could no longer remember how anything that I wrote worked. Lol me.
Friedl's masterpiece was my introduction to server-side programming in 2000. I'd been doing front-end for a few years with Dreamweaver and I was looking-up it's find & replace features in "Dreamweaver Bible 8" where regexes were mentioned as the ultimate weapon. "Mastering Regular Expressions" was referenced in a footnote and fortunately my local library had a copy. My mind was blown. Regex symbols were just so power…
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I think it was really Perl 6 that killed it. Perl had a significant lead over Python, and the Perl 6 announcement just sucked the life out of it.
It wasn't the language, it was Numpy. Everything that is built on top of Numpy is what made Python so popular. And I guess Perl also never had its Django (or Rails).
It’s got two of them - Catalyst (older still works fine) and Mojo - newer and shinier.
I think python is a better fit for mathematical work. I like to say that python helps you think more like the computer does, and that perl helps the computer think more like you.
People just keep wasting their precious lives on archaic stuff that has no future. Perl is dead. If these smart minds want to contribute to humanity, they should abandon this sunken ship and move to something more meaningful.
Seems like DuckDuckGo didn't get the memo.
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That certainly doesn't solve the problem of other people showboating their knowledge of obscure Perl sigils by using those ridiculous line-noise abbreviations in code you're trying to use and understand, so you have to look up each bit of obscure punctuation in its particular context in order to understand the code. If hard-to-read-and-remember syntax exists, people WILL use it. And some people will make a POINT to u…
Whatever happened to the neophyte raising him/herself up to level of the master? Programming seems to be the only profession in which the beginner is excused learning the language thoroughly and, worse, that he/she expects the language to be dumbed down to make it easier to learn. Can you imagine a budding musician complaining that musical notation should be made "easier for beginners"? If you want to grok Perl learn…
Yes. Yes I can[1]
[1]: https://how-to-play-electric-guitar.net/tab-symbols.html
The problem isn't merely that notation is easy/hard, but that people will not only pass judgement about a language (or any other idea), they will also work actively to convince others to agree with them, and oh yeah, that programmers are people too.
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That doesn't add up because today's most popular languages - JS, Java, Python, PHP and Ruby - were also released in the 90s.
As far as i know Java and PHP became popular later in the 90s / early 2000s. Javascript was browser only until 2010, Ruby only became popular after Rails came out mid-2000s. There is a decade gap there.
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Favorite syntactic sugar feature: the /x modifier which makes the regex ignore spaces and comments, meaning you can break your regex into multiple lines and comment them.
FWIW, this is the default in Raku regular expressions.
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- Efficient: from prototype to deployment, it's a matter of days. The choice of styles let people use paradigms they are familiar with, meaning they do things quickly. - Cheap: it does not cost much to hire someone to write perl. If they don't know how yet, the choice in style let them be efficient quickly. The code to be deployed is very lightweight, both in CPU and RAM usage. - Stable: no API break. No new module t…
The reason that code written 20 years ago still runs fine is that they rolled back 20 years of changes!
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PHP was a reimplementation of Perl by someone who didn't understand why Perl did things the way they did and so ended up creating a vastly inferior language. Other than maintaining some legacy projects, I've not touched PHP in over a decade and I'm glad to avoid it. Perl is a tool I still return to for some tasks (one was a bizarre management request for a spreadsheet of all the Java classes in a large project which…
Yes and No. PHP (Perl for Home Pages) main starting point for popularity was that it was easy to make into an Apache module that could be used on shared hosting. Perl's Apache module was a single interpreter for the whole server. Great for business sites and such, not good when you have multiple unrelated users using the same server. PHP was just something that you could turn on and uses on your shared hosting.
Yes, the memory isolation model of mod_php was the crucial factor in beating the competition. With mod_perl you had to write your Perl modules to a specification so that globals were not accessible by other hosts. That was too much of a risk for shared hosting providers. The situation is muddied, however, in that a lot of shared hosts only allow PHP as a cgi which, in theory, puts it on a level playing-field with Perl. However, in practice, Perl only has one PHP-alike templating framework - HTML::Mason - and that requires mod_perl to perform decently. So PHP's other advantage is that its templating engine is simply faster.