Perl 7 is going to be Perl 5.32, mostly

Post by bch » Thu, Jun 25, 2020, 2:31 AM UTC

simias wrote: post #407

deckard1 wrote: post #383

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> perl has been the same since 2002 if you ignore perl 6 then you might as well ignore python 3. And even still, python 2 is dead. There are only a handful of languages as well maintained as Perl 5. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perl_5_version_history Perl maintains strict backwards compatibility. I can run code that was written decades ago. I really am curious what features you think Perl 5 lacks. > Another issue is…

I haven't seen that much hate for Perl on HN. I personally used it for quite a while and liked it a lot. But I think it's reasonable to consider it a legacy language these days, next to Fortran, Ada and TCL. Are these languages still used in some niches? Certainly, TCL is still big for scripting ASIC/FPGA design tools last I checked. Similarly Perl projects will still be used and maintained for a long time, it may we…

Post by papito » Thu, Jun 25, 2020, 2:42 AM UTC

hpcjoe wrote: post #368

papito wrote: post #149

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IMDB was written in Perl, notoriously. Seeing that the layout has not changed in ages, I can only assume it's still Perl. I'd imagine a bigger rewrite effort would have led to a more slick iteration on the UI, and it seems the legacy HTML templates are still baked in.

Hmm ... don't conflate the presentation UI with the underlying language. I wrote my companies website (2 jobs ago) in Mojolicious (perl web framework), with a responsive UI, based in part upon bootstrap. Very modern (for the time) UI. All backed by a very fast implementation. IMDB seems plenty fast to me. UI isn't great, but that's more of a presentation layer design thing than a language thing.

Post by gkfasdfasdf » Thu, Jun 25, 2020, 2:49 AM UTC

Spivak wrote: post #319

gkfasdfasdf wrote: post #276

I still use Perl every now and again for powerful one-liners and I'm really glad it's around. Here is a bash function I use which takes args and merges and deduplicates PATH-like expressions: merge-args () { perl -e 'print join ":", grep {!$h{$_}++} split ":", join ":", @ARGV' "$@" } And I use as follows: export PATH="$(merge-args "${SCRIPT_DIR}"/clang-tidy-ex /usr/local/opt/llvm/bin "${INSTALL_DIR}"/{,samples/}bin "…

A pure bash alternative for comparison. merge-args() { local res for i; do case ":${res}:" in *:"$i":*) ;; *) res=${res+$res:}$i esac done echo $res }

Post by rjeli » Thu, Jun 25, 2020, 3:00 AM UTC

mfontani wrote: post #367

cesarb wrote: post #128

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> How does one tell Python to pass the contents of said array as distinct parameters to the function, instead of as a lone array parameter? With an asterisk: method(*array)

Right, which I sorta kinda get why coming from C - a *something is the thing pointed to by that something. How is that more understandable than @ vs \@ without knowing the language? My guess is it isn't.

Post by rosywoozlechan » Thu, Jun 25, 2020, 3:04 AM UTC

cogman10 wrote: post #400

gbacon wrote: post #394

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> I have worked with many languages, and Perl has always been one of the hardest to remember due to non-standard symbol abuse and a few strange semantics. For example?

I mean, the combinations of $%@ are really astoundingly bad. $ alone has so many different meanings and operations depending on context. You won't find that sort of thing in any other language. Not even PHP which for some bizarre reason brought $ along for the ride. Here's a fun exercise, write a dictionary of arrays. Now write a dictionary of 2d arrays. In any other language, that's hardly a challenge to both read a…