Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Perl on Rails (2007)

bbc.co.uk

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 66 posts

Re: Perl on Rails (2007)

#51

Post by petesergeant »

kraihx wrote: post #46
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

Ah yes, great work! I've submitted it as its own story: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33656829

Re: Perl on Rails (2007)

#52

Post by rrwo »

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…

Sigils are used for shell scripts and awk, and Perl is descended from both.

They are a useful visual indicator that something is a variable, so they don't bother me.

Newer versions of Perl add post-dereference syntax which reduces the line noise.

Re: Perl on Rails (2007)

#53

Post by nerdponx »

tyingq wrote: post #41
nerdponx wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I don't have good ones offhand, but whenever I write a script that spends a long time looping and doing a mix of numerical calculations and text processing, CPython beats Perl. I think this is partly due to how Perl treats numbers as a kind of second class data type.

However Perl handily beats CPython in startup time, so it's much faster for short-lived programs.

Re: Perl on Rails (2007)

#54

Post by mst »

petesergeant wrote: post #51
kraihx wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Ah yes, great work! I've submitted it as its own story: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33656829

Having released SQL::Abstract 2 people are trying to convince me to port things.

Since the SQLA2 expr layer was deliberately designed to be JSONable I have a horrible feeling I can actually do so and I might actually crack and do it, but if I do I'll be writing vanilla ES6. If you love typescript enough more, a commit bit will be yours for the asking.

Re: Perl on Rails (2007)

#55

Post by mst »

petesergeant wrote: post #16
azangru wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> Why [does Perl use a lot of weird punctuation] Because that’s how it started, and it maintains absolutely fantastic backwards compatibility. All languages have foibles… > Why do I need to [declare variables prior to use] Because this isn’t Python

> Why do I need to [declare variables prior to use]

Given the zen of python specifically says "explicit is better than implicit" I've always been stunned that python doesn't require that.

I've spent enough years writing perl that, believe me, I can hate its foibles more extensively and more accurately than most of the anti-perl people, and generally when I read criticisms of perl my first thought is "this wasn't wrong but it doesn't go nearly far enough."

But not requiring something like 'my' is python abdicating its own stated principles and while I don't feel I know python well enough to criticise it appropriately in general, this has always struck me as, in fact, a deeply un-pythonic attribute of the language.

Re: Perl on Rails (2007)

#56

Post by mst »

DonHopkins wrote: post #22
petesergeant wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Why [does Perl use a lot of weird punctuation] Because that’s how it started, and it maintains absolutely fantastic backwards compatibility. All languages have foibles… > Why do I need to [declare variables prior to use] Because this isn’t Python

>fantastic backwards compatibility Yeah, Perl 6 was so fantastically compatible it took so many decades to come out they had to rename it something else so as not to confuse people. >Because this isn’t Python Perl 6 isn't Perl, either.

Most of us never considered Raku, even before the rename, to be Perl.

A perl in the sense that, say, Common Lisp, Scheme and Clojure all count as a lisp.

But no further.

Re: Perl on Rails (2007)

#57

Post by mst »

jacobyoder wrote: post #49
tootie wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

I really can't stand PHP but as a veteran perl hacker I really do need to say "that's my personal opinion and I am -amazingly- impressed with what people have -done- with PHP even if I don't like it myself."

Re: Perl on Rails (2007)

#58

Post by systems_glitch »

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.

Weird. I often describe Ruby as "the best parts of Perl" to people who aren't familiar with Ruby.

Re: Perl on Rails (2007)

#59

Post by tiffanyh »

Reminds me of SQL on Rails.

https://youtu.be/0_PK1eDQyVg

I still crack up about this. Context is that in the early days of Rails, they did a lot of screencast showing how easy it was to create a blog and tons of code was generated for you making seem like with just a few commands you could create anything.

Post reply on HN