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

Not Your Grandfather’s Perl

stackoverflow.blog

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

61–70 of 257 posts

Re: Not Your Grandfather’s Perl

#61

Post by HeckFeck »

It's not objective, but I find I have more fun in Perl than any other language. The initial jump was steep, but it helped that I already knew some shell. Now I think in references, I can guess what $_ is going to be, I slap in a big, my $val = s//other_thing wherever I want, I could go on!

I think $_ belongs to a different era, before levelling everything to the lowest common denominator became seen as a good thing. I found the limitations of its rivals less than compelling, and besides JavaScript is arguably more complex than Perl these days.

Re: Not Your Grandfather’s Perl

#62

Post by csdvrx »

anthk wrote: post #16
wistlo wrote: post #13

"Bare bones" seems to be a good thing for Perl. I use Strawberry Perl on Windows and it is orders of magnitude faster than Powershell for processing large files of text strings using regular expressions. I hope the addition of a "new object-oriented programming framework" won't take away the "bare-bones" speed of the current release.

Perl's bindings for Win32 and OLE are amazing.

Would you have some interesting examples?

I love Win32 because it's the closest we have to a universal GUI format for software.

Re: Not Your Grandfather’s Perl

#63

Post by senorsmile »

yakubin wrote: post #35
forgotmypw17 wrote: post #4

With function signatures and state variables added in 5.010, I consider Perl feature-complete and have not really missed anything from it for as long as I've been writing Perl. What I do appreciate that's missing from many other languages and systems is the extreme committment to backwards compatibility. The knowledge that the next minor release won't break existing scripts is underrated, IMO. Solo project with ~23K…

I’ve had very limited contact with Perl, but for scripting purposes it does seem like the best option, so I intend to sit down to it and learn it better. It looks like a great next step after sed and awk (perl -pe). I love the ability to write terse scripts, reasonable speed for a scripting language and, as you said, backwards-compatibility (such a stark contrast compared to Python).

The "Learning Perl" book from O'Reilly is the best book to do this (and imho is one of the best written programming books).

Re: Not Your Grandfather’s Perl

#64

Post by jlv2 »

I spent the last 16 years of my career using Perl for about half of what I wrote.

And I read the article.

The title makes no sense. The article show anything meaningful as to why Perl has improved and is "not your Grandfather's Perl". Most of what the article talks about has been around for over a decade. If anything, it shows that Perl really still has under it the same old decrepit beast it always been hiding away.

Re: Not Your Grandfather’s Perl

#65

Post by CraigJPerry »

I don’t really miss perl. I do miss the period when perlmonks was relevant to me. I haven’t really seen a similar community since. Maybe rose tinted spectacles on my part but i learned some really enlightening algorithms on there specifically in text processing and i recall it being a really warm community.

Randall Schwarz used to run a podcast that was a total goldmine. Fond memories of listening to that on the train on the way to work.

Re: Not Your Grandfather’s Perl

#66

Post by someRandoJunk »

kqr wrote: post #52
stjohnswarts wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would argue that ruby as almost all the strengths of perl and conciseness with more coherency if you want a perl-like fluidity and terseness. I personally like python for anything that becomes more than a 100 lines of bash.

Does Ruby come pre-installed on virtually every Unix-like system out there?

You're confusing perl with ruby there.

Re: Not Your Grandfather’s Perl

#67

Post by eduction »

orf wrote: post #59

Sorry, but what? The top features they highlight here are a print statement that adds a new line, a change to the bonkers default of creating some kind of implicit global named variable every time you open a file, representing time as an object (with a strftime function!) and… function signatures? I wouldn’t call this as “Perl moving forward”, I’d call this “Perl is still about 20 years behind everyone else”. Wait un…

Ya those were my thoughts exactly, and I used Perl heavily for several years.

The number two feature they listed was released more than 22 years ago.

Perl is fine for certain tasks, I have no problem with people who choose to use it, but at a certain point I'd argue it's better to learn a new language than try to use Perl for a new type of task.

Re: Not Your Grandfather’s Perl

#68

Post by HeckFeck »

yakubin wrote: post #35
forgotmypw17 wrote: post #4

With function signatures and state variables added in 5.010, I consider Perl feature-complete and have not really missed anything from it for as long as I've been writing Perl. What I do appreciate that's missing from many other languages and systems is the extreme committment to backwards compatibility. The knowledge that the next minor release won't break existing scripts is underrated, IMO. Solo project with ~23K…

I’ve had very limited contact with Perl, but for scripting purposes it does seem like the best option, so I intend to sit down to it and learn it better. It looks like a great next step after sed and awk (perl -pe). I love the ability to write terse scripts, reasonable speed for a scripting language and, as you said, backwards-compatibility (such a stark contrast compared to Python).

The Modern Perl book is great, it explains a lot of the Perl-isms to a modern audience.

http://modernperlbooks.com/ is where you can read it for free.

Re: Not Your Grandfather’s Perl

#69

Post by csdvrx »

mikejulietbravo wrote: post #51

Perl receives such an unnecessary amount of hate

> Perl receives such an unnecessary amount of hate

I agree. We might deny it, because we are geeks, not fashionistas, but there's such a thing as "cool for geeks" like running Rust code on MacOS with some PostgreSQL sprinkled on, and such a thing as "uncool" like running Perl code over Windows and exchanging CSV files.

Personally, IDGAF: I care about what works the best, not what's cool. I care about performance. I care about the code not breaking due to weird compatibility issues. I care about keeping the stack as simple as possible, because what's simple often works better.

If, god forbid, I need something more complicated than CSV, I reach for sqlite --- which, unfortunately, is starting to become the "cool" option, and therefore might get turned into the proverbial hammer that makes all your problems look like nails!

Re: Not Your Grandfather’s Perl

#70

Post by mikejulietbravo »

michaelwww wrote: post #54
mikejulietbravo wrote: post #51

Perl receives such an unnecessary amount of hate

I don't think it's hate. I think it's more "why would I choose Perl over Python?" Perl has a painful syntax, Python greatly improves on this with easy syntax. I don't want to have to relearn the syntax every time I reach for a scripting tool.

Sure, but there are a lot of times where if you care about performance you should use Perl. General purpose? Sure, Python.
Post reply on HN