61–70 of 88 posts
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Perl 6 is not meant to interoperate directly with Perl 5. It's not an incremental update in any way. IMO, it would be a lot clearer if Perl 6 weren't called Perl.
I agree totally. Perl6 is to Perl5 what VB.NET was to VB6. They aren't the same.
Does any body remember when Larry Wall and others were rewriting all the Unix commands in Perl? I thought that was cool but I never heard of it again, and haven't been able to find references to it.
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I currently code for my day job in a proprietary extension to a proprietary dialect of BASIC from the mid-80's. This language is legitimately broken, and has significant disadvantages at every turn. It has no real functions, no block-level scoping, lists are stored as delimited strings, there are no hashes, and nothing even resembling objects. Perl has all of these things. If you're coding in Perl and you write bad c…
But that's because you already know perl. For new people... I don't see a reason to go there. Perl smells funny - there are better alternatives that don't require you to spend time learning (for example) what can be referenced, what cannot, when is \ not taking a reference, why I cannot have lists-inside-lists, and how is that different from arrays anyway, etc. And that's only one source of that funny smell... For be…
That's a silly argument. Do you know of any language where beginners don't have to learn between language primitives to create complex data structures, for example? Assuming (for example) that parentheses create lists and that lists are first-class data types in Perl (and neither is true) is a fine example of Blub programming false cognates.
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But that's because you already know perl. For new people... I don't see a reason to go there. Perl smells funny - there are better alternatives that don't require you to spend time learning (for example) what can be referenced, what cannot, when is \ not taking a reference, why I cannot have lists-inside-lists, and how is that different from arrays anyway, etc. And that's only one source of that funny smell... For be…
There are better alternatives that don't require you to spend time learning .... That's a silly argument. Do you know of any language where beginners don't have to learn between language primitives to create complex data structures, for example? Assuming (for example) that parentheses create lists and that lists are first-class data types in Perl (and neither is true) is a fine example of Blub programming false cogna…
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There are better alternatives that don't require you to spend time learning .... That's a silly argument. Do you know of any language where beginners don't have to learn between language primitives to create complex data structures, for example? Assuming (for example) that parentheses create lists and that lists are first-class data types in Perl (and neither is true) is a fine example of Blub programming false cogna…
There's a difference between learning the difference where the language is consistent and when it handles everything differently. I see many problems, but staying with the list thing: \ creates references, () creates lists, \$a is a reference to $a, \($a, $b) is not a reference to an array, but it's (\$a, \$b), [$a, $b] creates a reference to an array without \. If I have a choice, I'll take a consistent solution ins…
Lists and arrays are not the same thing in Perl. Parentheses do not create lists in Perl. Parentheses group terms.
You'd have the same sort of problem conflating tuples and lists in Python, especially if you don't know about the special comma syntax and zero-or-one element tuples.
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There's a difference between learning the difference where the language is consistent and when it handles everything differently. I see many problems, but staying with the list thing: \ creates references, () creates lists, \$a is a reference to $a, \($a, $b) is not a reference to an array, but it's (\$a, \$b), [$a, $b] creates a reference to an array without \. If I have a choice, I'll take a consistent solution ins…
Here's your problem: if you skip learning the basics of the language -- if you assume that the fundamental behavior of a new language is the same as other languages you know -- you will suffer constant friction and confusion. Lists and arrays are not the same thing in Perl. Parentheses do not create lists in Perl. Parentheses group terms. You'd have the same sort of problem conflating tuples and lists in Python, espe…
I didn't skip the basics of the language. Still - basics keep biting me every single time. I don't think it's my problem after all... I mean - it may have its strange rules - but if it's less easy to handle than other languages, it won't draw new people in.
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The phrase "Perl holds the internet together" was coined by analogy with Perl's widespread use as a glue language. You've interpreted it too literally. It doesn't mean that you can't set up a router or another piece of Internet infrastructure without using Perl. It means that Perl is used in a lot of unexpected places, and that a lot of critical things are "held together" by Perl. Even if you think your website is ru…
"It means that Perl is used in a lot of unexpected places, and that a lot of critical things are "held together" by Perl. Even if you think your website is running on Java, some systems administrator probably has a cronjob written in Perl critical to its operation." In the above sentence replace Perl with C/C++/awk/lua/Python/Ruby/almost-any-language and it makes as much sense. Which is probably another indicator tha…
Article's conclusion: After a short lapse, Perl development is picking up and enthusiasm for Perl 5 is as strong as ever. I would agree. A little over a decade ago, Perl suffered from the same problems which plagued JavaScript in its early days: ease of writing shitty code, mountains of shitty sample code, and a community which did not vehemently encourage the writing of unshitty code. This caused a backlash which la…
"Perl development is picking up and enthusiasm for Perl 5 is as strong as ever." I will take your word for it, but I do have to say (speaking as someone with a lot of grey in his hair) that I haven't seen a young developer choose to work primarily in perl (over ruby or Python or Java or C#) in ages. Most new projects/startups don't seem to choose perl as their primary language. I readily concede that this is probably…
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Here's your problem: if you skip learning the basics of the language -- if you assume that the fundamental behavior of a new language is the same as other languages you know -- you will suffer constant friction and confusion. Lists and arrays are not the same thing in Perl. Parentheses do not create lists in Perl. Parentheses group terms. You'd have the same sort of problem conflating tuples and lists in Python, espe…
Not really. I like learning languages and enjoy much weirder ones than Perl. Still - Perl is way more inconsistent than anything I've seen before and believe me I tried - went through the same Perl tutorials every time I had to fix some code. Every single time spending hours finding out some strange thing I wouldn't expect. Actually I learned Python at the same time I was learning Perl the first time. I spent two day…
perlfaq4 explains the difference between arrays and lists in Perl in plain language. One is a variable. The other is a value.
The rest is operator precedence, grouping, and context. If you don't understand those, you don't understand Perl. Granted, most tutorials do a terrible job of explaining those, but these are fundamental concepts.
* ... but if it's less easy to handle than other languages, it won't draw new people in.*
That sounds like a tempting explanation for language popularity, but I doubt it's true -- it's too close to the "Obviously the technically best solution deserves to win!" fallacy. I suspect that practicality, availability, and the ease of which you can just get something done trumps quality. Certainly PHP's ease of deployment has contributed to its popularity more than consistency and correctness of design.
The whole article fails to mention any advantage of Perl over the languages it's compared to (wonder why). The sooner Perl falls into obscurity, the better.