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Why Perl isn't Going Away Soon (Or Ever)

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Re: Why Perl isn't Going Away Soon (Or Ever)

#71

Post by evgen »

mock wrote: post #68
plinkplonk wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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…

You might just not be in the right echo chamber. In the last few years I've been in several startups where perl is the primary development language. Most of the people we hired were in their mid twenties to mid thirties, which seems about what you'd expect for startups. HN seems to be a hangout for lots of python (and lisp, and ruby) people, but less so for perl and php people. Obviously I do hang out in the right ec…

As a counter-example, the previous startup I worked at was a medium-sized perl shop in SV. They had an incredibly hard time recruiting high-quality engineers. Finding good coders who were proficient in perl was a rarity and it seemed as though all of the various perl shops were fighting over these people when they hit the market; finding interns and recent college grads who either knew perl or were willing to spend the time to learn it was almost impossible. From what I saw the pool of perl talent was just not as broad as people claim.

Re: Why Perl isn't Going Away Soon (Or Ever)

#72

Post by mock »

evgen wrote: post #71
mock wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You might just not be in the right echo chamber. In the last few years I've been in several startups where perl is the primary development language. Most of the people we hired were in their mid twenties to mid thirties, which seems about what you'd expect for startups. HN seems to be a hangout for lots of python (and lisp, and ruby) people, but less so for perl and php people. Obviously I do hang out in the right ec…

As a counter-example, the previous startup I worked at was a medium-sized perl shop in SV. They had an incredibly hard time recruiting high-quality engineers. Finding good coders who were proficient in perl was a rarity and it seemed as though all of the various perl shops were fighting over these people when they hit the market; finding interns and recent college grads who either knew perl or were willing to spend t…

I haven't ever had problems hiring good perl people for the startups I've founded. But that may just be the area (Vancouver has a bunch of really good perl people). Also I try to only do cool things and treat people well. ;-)

I see your point about talent though. There are quite a few really good perl programmers, and a lot of "I once wrote a script in that" types, but not many in the middle. In some ways this is a strength - if you're programming in perl these days, odds are you've stuck with it because you actually like the language, so you're probably pretty good at it. On the other hand, it's not taught in school, so unless folks learn it on their own or on the job, there might be a real lack of new talent coming up the ranks.

As a programmer for hire, I can't complain about the wages. As an entrepreneur, I know where to find the good people, so it's not really a problem for me.

(I would also point out that any good programmer or intern/recent college grad who wishes to become a good programmer should always be willing to learn a new language on the company's tab. If they aren't, that probably says more about them than the language).

Re: Why Perl isn't Going Away Soon (Or Ever)

#73

Post by mock »

jergosh wrote: post #24
DrSprout wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

It's all fine until you have to work with bad legacy code ;) My last project at work was rewriting a 4k line monstrosity in Perl into 500 lines of Python which do exactly the same. I can't even blame the original authors (it was likely their first larger program), it's just that Perl makes it so easy to write horrible code.

Bad legacy code is certainly unpleasant. I'm currently working with a large code base that was mostly written about 10 years ago. It's not even particularly bad code, it's just big, and old, and crufty. But we can refactor that code a bit at a time into something clean and new, using modern perl. And we can do that without having to rewrite the entire thing in one shot. And that's one of the many advantages that being a good perl developer gives you. Another one is that that giant legacy code base still runs on a modern perl binary, because perl is (with a few well documented exceptions) a very very stable language. Most of the big modern perl changes are just modules. And they're backwards compatible with the old stuff too.

Re: Why Perl isn't Going Away Soon (Or Ever)

#74

Post by evgen »

mock wrote: post #72
evgen wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a counter-example, the previous startup I worked at was a medium-sized perl shop in SV. They had an incredibly hard time recruiting high-quality engineers. Finding good coders who were proficient in perl was a rarity and it seemed as though all of the various perl shops were fighting over these people when they hit the market; finding interns and recent college grads who either knew perl or were willing to spend t…

I haven't ever had problems hiring good perl people for the startups I've founded. But that may just be the area (Vancouver has a bunch of really good perl people). Also I try to only do cool things and treat people well. ;-) I see your point about talent though. There are quite a few really good perl programmers, and a lot of "I once wrote a script in that" types, but not many in the middle. In some ways this is a s…

The company was doing some pretty cool stuff and the team/pay/benefits were on the high-end for the valley, so that was not really a problem, it was mostly a lot of competition for a small pool of people worth having.

any good programmer or intern/recent college grad who wishes to become a good programmer should always be willing to learn a new language on the company's tab. If they aren't, that probably says more about them than the language

Would you learn COBOL on the company's tab? I wouldn't waste my time. Right or wrong, the impression that most people under 30 have of perl is that it is crufty write-once-read-never-again code used back when cgi scripts ruled the world; a dead-end skill that won't improve their long-term prospects.

Re: Why Perl isn't Going Away Soon (Or Ever)

#75

Post by berntb »

btilly wrote: post #58
sigzero wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did somebody really say "Perl 6 is coming real soon now?" I have only ever seen "by christmas" and they don't mention what year.

According to http://use.perl.org/~pmichaud/journal/39411 (written last summer) this Spring (likely April) is targeted for a production release of a usable subset of Perl 6. The same information is posted to http://www.perlfoundation.org/perl6/index.cgi?Rakudo_Star . They obviously didn't make that. I don't know what the current state is or what the exact thinking is now.

http://www.perlfoundation.org/perl6/index.cgi?rakudo_star

[..] original release plan was for late April 2010 [family crisis for lead developer]. The release date [..] sometime in the second quarter of 2010.

Re: Why Perl isn't Going Away Soon (Or Ever)

#76

Post by ianb »

DrSprout wrote: post #10
nailer wrote: post #3

No technology ever goes away. Nobody is saying Perl won't be developed, just that people are less likely to use other languages for new projects in favor of newer technologies.

The article still makes an excellent point, which is that the difference between most of the 'newer technologies' and Perl is basically marketing, not any actual superiority of language design. You can write line noise in Perl, but you can also write Python in Perl. It may not be quite as pretty as Python, but as far as use in a production environment it will be equally useful.

I consider Perl's data structures to be genuinely inferior. Lists that cannot contain other lists are not reasonable in a high level language. Pointers are not reasonable in a high level language. Explicit function signatures are a superior language design.

Re: Why Perl isn't Going Away Soon (Or Ever)

#77

Post by mock »

evgen wrote: post #74
mock wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I haven't ever had problems hiring good perl people for the startups I've founded. But that may just be the area (Vancouver has a bunch of really good perl people). Also I try to only do cool things and treat people well. ;-) I see your point about talent though. There are quite a few really good perl programmers, and a lot of "I once wrote a script in that" types, but not many in the middle. In some ways this is a s…

The company was doing some pretty cool stuff and the team/pay/benefits were on the high-end for the valley, so that was not really a problem, it was mostly a lot of competition for a small pool of people worth having. any good programmer or intern/recent college grad who wishes to become a good programmer should always be willing to learn a new language on the company's tab. If they aren't, that probably says more ab…

If someone has interesting work, and wants to pay me to learn COBOL, then absolutely I will. Actually, I have another startup in the works that probably will require learning COBOL at some point anyway...

Re: Why Perl isn't Going Away Soon (Or Ever)

#78

Post by chromatic »

ianb wrote: post #76
DrSprout wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The article still makes an excellent point, which is that the difference between most of the 'newer technologies' and Perl is basically marketing, not any actual superiority of language design. You can write line noise in Perl, but you can also write Python in Perl. It may not be quite as pretty as Python, but as far as use in a production environment it will be equally useful.

I consider Perl's data structures to be genuinely inferior. Lists that cannot contain other lists are not reasonable in a high level language. Pointers are not reasonable in a high level language. Explicit function signatures are a superior language design.

Lists that cannot contain other lists are not reasonable in a high level language.

Perl has supported arrays of arrays since 1994.

Pointers are not reasonable in a high level language.

Perl has never supported pointers.

Explicit function signatures are a superior language design.

I agree with this. Perl 5 should have had them years ago.

Re: Why Perl isn't Going Away Soon (Or Ever)

#79

Post by chromatic »

gamache wrote: post #34
jergosh wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a rather twisted reasoning, with Perl 6 on the doorstep ;)

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.

Perl 6 is not meant to interoperate directly with Perl 5.

Indeed it is.

Re: Why Perl isn't Going Away Soon (Or Ever)

#80

Post by ianb »

chromatic wrote: post #78
ianb wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I consider Perl's data structures to be genuinely inferior. Lists that cannot contain other lists are not reasonable in a high level language. Pointers are not reasonable in a high level language. Explicit function signatures are a superior language design.

Lists that cannot contain other lists are not reasonable in a high level language. Perl has supported arrays of arrays since 1994. Pointers are not reasonable in a high level language. Perl has never supported pointers. Explicit function signatures are a superior language design. I agree with this. Perl 5 should have had them years ago.

If you put a list in a list in Perl, don't you have to specifically dereference the sublist when accessing it? Otherwise you get what looks to my eye like a pointer (a weird random number). The first google result I get is this: http://www.webreference.com/programming/perl/nested/ -- and to me "reference" == "pointer". And the fact that it is all weakly typed (that is, pointers are not a distinct type) makes it that much worse.
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