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Perl on Rails (2007)

bbc.co.uk

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Re: Perl on Rails (2007)

#41

Post by tyingq »

nerdponx wrote: post #25
petesergeant wrote: post #10

Comments are hilarious, especially knowing some of those people commenting most critically had recently been working at FM&T. At the short stint I did at the Beeb I spent a lot of time doing code for date maths using SSI and Perl before they decided to completely rewrite what we were doing in Flash. Perl is a great language, and Catalyst and Mojolicious are rock solid, as is DBIx::Class. I work all day with TypeScrip…

Every time I try to write Perl, between the sigils, weak support for numbers, and the archaic-feeling way of handling parameters in subroutines, I come away slightly disgusted. The convenience of the text processing routines is not a novelty or productivity improvement compared to other languages nowadays. And Perl seems slower than Python now on the kinds of workloads where I would be tempted to use Perl. What am I…

>And Perl seems slower than Python now

Do you have some examples? Outside of some specific python extensions that are written in C, Perl is almost always faster than Python for me.

Re: Perl on Rails (2007)

#42

Post by tootie »

petesergeant wrote: post #10

Comments are hilarious, especially knowing some of those people commenting most critically had recently been working at FM&T. At the short stint I did at the Beeb I spent a lot of time doing code for date maths using SSI and Perl before they decided to completely rewrite what we were doing in Flash. Perl is a great language, and Catalyst and Mojolicious are rock solid, as is DBIx::Class. I work all day with TypeScrip…

I wrote mostly Perl for nearly ten years of my career and I miss it. It was so easy to transition between writing big codebases and doing little command line stuff. The super power was how easy it was to write little command line stuff that could quickly include all the enterprise libraries.

Re: Perl on Rails (2007)

#43

Post by xorcist »

azangru wrote: post #14
petesergeant wrote: post #10

Comments are hilarious, especially knowing some of those people commenting most critically had recently been working at FM&T. At the short stint I did at the Beeb I spent a lot of time doing code for date maths using SSI and Perl before they decided to completely rewrite what we were doing in Flash. Perl is a great language, and Catalyst and Mojolicious are rock solid, as is DBIx::Class. I work all day with TypeScrip…

> Perl is a great language I don't write Perl often, which probably explains why every time I go back to it (we have a legacy Perl app), I get tripped up, over and over again, by the sigils, and the rest of the visual noise — and I can't help wondering, why?. Why can other scripting languages deal perfectly fine with the ambiguity that Perl resolves with a dollar sign as opposed to a percent sign, or an at-sign, or a…

The sigil is there because Perl is made for text templating, like bash and PHP. Similar to f-strings in Python 3. Having several sigils is because Perl has language context as first order feature. It is a form of operator overloading.

I have the opposite reaction than the one you describe. Why haven't other languages picked up on contexts?

It's an elegant to solution to the fact that casts can be ambiguous in late-bound dynamically typed languages. PHP specifically can suffer from this where the automatic casting gives you a different type than you expected and no one notices because it isn't an error with dynamic types. It eliminates a class of errors.

The other things I miss most from Perl are taint mode, and Moose. Metadata for objects is such a good idea, where you can see all the traits and other properties in one place.

What I don't miss about Perl is that complex data structures are overly verbose. Multidimensional arrays and hashes are much too hard to read. Ruby did that much better.

Re: Perl on Rails (2007)

#45

Post by Doctor_Fegg »

stevebmark wrote: post #8

Ruby is well known as the “bad parts of Perl” so there’s a beautiful horror here. It’s also funny that Ruby is the slowest of the dynamic languages, and that Perl is much faster. They created a magnificent mind bending nightmare.

If this is "well known" then someone should tell Google, because right now it's not corroborating that assertion...

Re: Perl on Rails (2007)

#46

Post by kraihx »

petesergeant wrote: post #10

Comments are hilarious, especially knowing some of those people commenting most critically had recently been working at FM&T. At the short stint I did at the Beeb I spent a lot of time doing code for date maths using SSI and Perl before they decided to completely rewrite what we were doing in Flash. Perl is a great language, and Catalyst and Mojolicious are rock solid, as is DBIx::Class. I work all day with TypeScrip…

Just in case you missed it, Mojolicious is also available for TypeScript now, and the developer experience is pretty close to the Perl original. ;) https://mojojs.org

Re: Perl on Rails (2007)

#48

Post by uhtred »

petesergeant wrote: post #10

Comments are hilarious, especially knowing some of those people commenting most critically had recently been working at FM&T. At the short stint I did at the Beeb I spent a lot of time doing code for date maths using SSI and Perl before they decided to completely rewrite what we were doing in Flash. Perl is a great language, and Catalyst and Mojolicious are rock solid, as is DBIx::Class. I work all day with TypeScrip…

Mojolicious::lite is amazing; I'm using it on a personal project at the moment.

I love Perl, it's exactly what I need in a programming language. I picked it up this year as I wanted a versatile and fast scripting language in my toolkit.

Re: Perl on Rails (2007)

#49

Post by jacobyoder »

tootie wrote: post #42
petesergeant wrote: post #10

Comments are hilarious, especially knowing some of those people commenting most critically had recently been working at FM&T. At the short stint I did at the Beeb I spent a lot of time doing code for date maths using SSI and Perl before they decided to completely rewrite what we were doing in Flash. Perl is a great language, and Catalyst and Mojolicious are rock solid, as is DBIx::Class. I work all day with TypeScrip…

I wrote mostly Perl for nearly ten years of my career and I miss it. It was so easy to transition between writing big codebases and doing little command line stuff. The super power was how easy it was to write little command line stuff that could quickly include all the enterprise libraries.

I feel the same about PHP. It's easy to scale up, and can scale down to small CLI scripts (but can include any utility libraries you need as well).

Re: Perl on Rails (2007)

#50

Post by nextaccountic »

blop wrote: post #36

I miss perl. I don't think there are any other scripting languages that allow you to write very concise one-liners that can do very complex things. That's also where perl got its bad reputation from, but it's more a discipline issue than a language problem. I always rewrote my explorative one-liners more cleanly when I committed them to a final program, but nothing forces you to do it like python does.

> I don't think there are any other scripting languages that allow you to write very concise one-liners that can do very complex things.

Ruby maybe? It feels like a saner Perl to me

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