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Perl 5.26.0 released

nntp.perl.org

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Re: Perl 5.26.0 released

#51

Post by ilkkao »

rcthompson wrote: post #49
sverhagen wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, impressive community effort for a language that... Well... I have heard nothing good about in any "at the water cooler" conversation that I was ever in, over the past fifteen years or so. Except, of course, that Perl is awesome at regular expressions, an advantage that most languages must have caught up on, no? Not for nothing Perl shows up in most hated-lists all around town (top 10 at Stack Overflow).

Perl is still the only language I've seen that has a dedicated syntax for regular expressions. Every other language requires you to write your regexes as strings, which puts you squarely in backslash hell. (I'm sure there must be other languages with dedicated regex syntax, but I'm not aware of any.)

Javascript is like Perl: /foo/i.test('foobar') is valid JS.

Re: Perl 5.26.0 released

#52

Post by cutler »

rcthompson wrote: post #49
sverhagen wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, impressive community effort for a language that... Well... I have heard nothing good about in any "at the water cooler" conversation that I was ever in, over the past fifteen years or so. Except, of course, that Perl is awesome at regular expressions, an advantage that most languages must have caught up on, no? Not for nothing Perl shows up in most hated-lists all around town (top 10 at Stack Overflow).

Perl is still the only language I've seen that has a dedicated syntax for regular expressions. Every other language requires you to write your regexes as strings, which puts you squarely in backslash hell. (I'm sure there must be other languages with dedicated regex syntax, but I'm not aware of any.)

Ruby is a direct descendant of Perl and borrows its regex syntax.

Re: Perl 5.26.0 released

#53

Post by Ardren »

rcthompson wrote: post #49
sverhagen wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, impressive community effort for a language that... Well... I have heard nothing good about in any "at the water cooler" conversation that I was ever in, over the past fifteen years or so. Except, of course, that Perl is awesome at regular expressions, an advantage that most languages must have caught up on, no? Not for nothing Perl shows up in most hated-lists all around town (top 10 at Stack Overflow).

Perl is still the only language I've seen that has a dedicated syntax for regular expressions. Every other language requires you to write your regexes as strings, which puts you squarely in backslash hell. (I'm sure there must be other languages with dedicated regex syntax, but I'm not aware of any.)

Javascript has regex literals

    /foo\sbar/i;
Is the same as:

    new RegExp('foo\\sbar', 'i');

Re: Perl 5.26.0 released

#54

Post by cutler »

sethammons wrote: post #33
sverhagen wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, impressive community effort for a language that... Well... I have heard nothing good about in any "at the water cooler" conversation that I was ever in, over the past fifteen years or so. Except, of course, that Perl is awesome at regular expressions, an advantage that most languages must have caught up on, no? Not for nothing Perl shows up in most hated-lists all around town (top 10 at Stack Overflow).

Perl's regex matching is faster than Go's, last I checked. At my work, we have a few large perl (and python) legacy codebases that are processing billions of messages a day. We are replacing them with far more performant Go. It is great to work with a senior Perl guy who can slam out solutions way faster than I can in any other language. However, for us, concurrency (and readability) is important. I like perl's AnyEv…

Go's regex implementation is inferior to Perl's, feature-wise. For performance Go eschew's a certain amount of backtracking as far as I remember. If you want Perl regex compatibility in Go you have to add a PCRE lib.

Re: Perl 5.26.0 released

#55

Post by sangnoir »

liotier wrote: post #25
sverhagen wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, impressive community effort for a language that... Well... I have heard nothing good about in any "at the water cooler" conversation that I was ever in, over the past fifteen years or so. Except, of course, that Perl is awesome at regular expressions, an advantage that most languages must have caught up on, no? Not for nothing Perl shows up in most hated-lists all around town (top 10 at Stack Overflow).

> I have heard nothing good about in any "at the water cooler" conversation that I was ever in, over the past fifteen years or so. Whenever I think of something that has anything to do with batch data munging, there is usually half a dozen Perl modules that already do it. I have no opinion about Perl as a language but I like how rich the ecosystems is for that sort of project.

> I have no opinion about Perl as a language but I like how rich the ecosystems is for that sort of project.

CPAN was way ahead of the competition - it was elegant where other languages would require you to manually download dependencies archives and wrangle them like a barbarian.

Re: Perl 5.26.0 released

#56

Post by mdnormy »

thinkMOAR wrote: post #10
rglullis wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The only big company I know that uses Perl extensively is booking.com, and I think that has more to do with any technical merit from the language, and just that is what they started and it was working for them. To be honest, I think Perl still powers a whole lot of systems, and certainly is a powerful tool for someone who is a Unix sysadmin, but this kind of job is dying. And as a language, I think Perl has nothing o…

Why do you think unix sysadmin function is dying? Just curious.

DevOps duh

In all seriousness I'm glad with these changes. I'm paid more to be NIX sysadmin, with minimal working knowledge of AWS/Azure/GCP.

All hail buzzword!

Re: Perl 5.26.0 released

#57

Post by gkya »

kluck wrote: post #9
0xFFC wrote: post #3

Guys I am genuinely asking this and I have zero intent on bashing on Perl. What is the position of Perl industry right now? how much it can compete with Python. Where does it compete? is it on losing side ? P.S. I am student and I have no real perspective on what is going on in industry right now.

Honestly, you are asking the wrong question. How can two turing complete programming languages even "compete"? I though about this a long time and came to the conclusion that it's not worth the effort to come up with an answer unless objective metrics are beeing found.

Good luck finding Ioke jobs then.

Re: Perl 5.26.0 released

#58

Post by cutler »

0xFFC wrote: post #3

Guys I am genuinely asking this and I have zero intent on bashing on Perl. What is the position of Perl industry right now? how much it can compete with Python. Where does it compete? is it on losing side ? P.S. I am student and I have no real perspective on what is going on in industry right now.

My Indeed.com API client, which eliminates duplicates, shows 39 Perl jobs by title search in London compared with 405 Python and 166 Ruby. For the UK it's 64 Perl to 741 Python and 274 Ruby. So most of the Perl jobs are London-based. To put it in perspective, the same stats show Golang with only half the number of Perl jobs.

Re: Perl 5.26.0 released

#59

Post by cutler »

stevekemp wrote: post #12
0xFFC wrote: post #3

Guys I am genuinely asking this and I have zero intent on bashing on Perl. What is the position of Perl industry right now? how much it can compete with Python. Where does it compete? is it on losing side ? P.S. I am student and I have no real perspective on what is going on in industry right now.

Even now I start web-projects with Perl. It's not "cool", it's not "sexy", but there package collection ( http://cpan.org/ ) is __huge__. I find it unlikely that new people will suddenly rediscover perl, in the golang/node.js/python-centric state the world is in. But the people who love it, do continue to love it, and do continue to do useful and essential things with it.

The CPAN argument for choosing Perl was relevant about 10 years ago but if you look at http://modulecounts.com you'll find Ruby, Python, PHP, JS and Java have an order of magnitude more libraries to choose from. CPAN is not __huge__ by today's standards. Drupal alone has the same number of modules. The declining community also means many of the libraries on CPAN are unlikely to be maintained.

Re: Perl 5.26.0 released

#60

Post by hoytech »

Ardren wrote: post #53
rcthompson wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Perl is still the only language I've seen that has a dedicated syntax for regular expressions. Every other language requires you to write your regexes as strings, which puts you squarely in backslash hell. (I'm sure there must be other languages with dedicated regex syntax, but I'm not aware of any.)

Javascript has regex literals /foo\sbar/i; Is the same as: new RegExp('foo\\sbar', 'i');

One thing that annoys me a bit about the JS syntax though: As far as I know, JS regexp literals don't have custom delimiter support. For instance in perl you can do this:

    $str =~ m{/some/path/\w+}
But in JS you need to escape the / characters, or use a normal string as an argument to Regexp, in which case you need to escape the backslashes:

    /\/some\/path\/\w+/
    Regexp("/some/path/\\w+")
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