531–540 of 573 posts
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JS is probably closer to billions.
Not just orders of magnitude more money, but more importantly the large number of incredibly talented people working full time on JavaScript, in many different companies and research institutions, collaborating together. JavaScript benefits from an overwhelming network effect and critical mass of tools and developers, that Perl just can't touch, and never will.
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;
I hate unless! It always makes me stop and think a few times, causing double or even triple negatives in my brain. What's wrong with something like "print this if not $error"? Maybe that's because I'm not a native English speaker?
if not not_implemented
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I don't think your performance numbers are very accurate. I've done a bit of Perl and a lot of Python and they're fairly comparable in most cases. Python is lightning fast for a lot of scripting tasks and I generally use very few libraries for day to day tasks because the Python stdlib is so good. Unless you're doing something really simple with Perl command line switches that operate over an entire file, I'd bet Per…
No, his estimates look pretty accurate to me. I've also done a fair bit of both Perl and Python (including working with the internals in C). Perl is significantly faster than Python for many types of common string manipulation tasks. They're both fast, sure, but Perl has some key optimizations.
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I don't think your performance numbers are very accurate. I've done a bit of Perl and a lot of Python and they're fairly comparable in most cases. Python is lightning fast for a lot of scripting tasks and I generally use very few libraries for day to day tasks because the Python stdlib is so good. Unless you're doing something really simple with Perl command line switches that operate over an entire file, I'd bet Per…
> I don't think your performance numbers are very accurate. Food for thought. https://benchmarksgame-team.pages.debian.net/benchmarksgame/...
Why does this happen so often to certain language version numbers? ECMAScript 4, PHP 6, and now Perl 6.
What is there to gain in calling it Perl 7? It seems needlessly disruptive, rather than just calling it 5.34 or whatever is next.
I was part of a team that wrote significant parts of Amazon's payment processing systems in Perl in the late 90s. I really loved the language. It's object system was so flexible and powerful. Once you understood how write idiomatic perl. It was a joy to use. I'm looking forward to trying out Perl 7.
Ok, so I wrote tons of Perl and am to this day a fan, but I don’t think one can call a blessed hash (or scalar for the fancy folks) an object _system_. It is flexible and fun and I do miss it. True story: years of passing functions to other functions and map/greps made the switch to FP Scala (another language I fear will die) a lot easier!
I especially like the sigils - they serve in a way as a primitive type system and actually convey useful information when reading code. I suspect people who complain about them are the same who dislike strong typing.
Interestingly, like you, nowadays I am very fond of Scala.
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My understanding was that Perl's OO system was directly inspired by Python's. I can't find a source on that though.
Other way round I think.
> I don’t really know much about Python. I only stole its object system for Perl 5. I have since repented.
I've been a perl zealot since 2005. I didn't even know "python" existed until around 2008 when I found a script file with a ".py" file ending in a fresh ubuntu install. I started going to perl conferences sometime after 2010 when someone on irc informed be about them. I learned so much in those conferences, mainly about the alternatives to cgi and the modern OOP "framework" named "moose". I thought I was in heaven. I…
I worked some years with Perl, and while it was fun most of the time, it had a lot of frustrating things that made it difficult to have consistent builds and dependency management. The "There's more than one way to do it" mantra is very damaging when all you want is a productive language to produce something, vs having fun implementing or tinkering with libraries in CPAN. There's a lot of research, including taking a look at the code to really know what the library does, to assemble programs in Perl.
Once you get over the initial conceptual barrier and remember how the sigils are used, and get used to the bless object system, it is fun to develop in it, on an intellectual level. But rather annoying on an "enterprise" level.
In the end, I find it very difficult to justify using Perl over almost any other language. Even PHP would be better for dev teams, due to the higher focus on productivity frameworks, even if the language holds no distinctive advantage over any other. I felt Perl is not really a professional language, but the product of a whimsical creator and community (which, by the way, is very welcoming and open).
There used to be a big Python/Perl debate. I'm not sure I could have predicted how well that would turn out for Python, and how poorly for Perl. Readability and ease of use matters?
Probably because Python resembles pseudo-code.
Anecdotally I've heard from a few people who said Python was the first language where ideas just made sense to them. An "easy to learn" language, in other words.
(I can't relate to that and don't know why Python is thought of that way. As far as I can tell, beneath the syntax (which is prettier than Perl), Python is a messy language with even messier standard library.)