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Not Your Grandfather’s Perl

stackoverflow.blog

1–10 of 257 posts

Re: Not Your Grandfather’s Perl

#2
Thumb up for function signatures!

I slowly switched from Perl to Ruby for writing my own text processing scripts. A loop with is very convenient but I was using Ruby for work (still do among other languages) and Perl for nothing. I was forgetting how to do stuff in Perl.

Re: Not Your Grandfather’s Perl

#3
Even on modern hardware with vectorization, the speed of perl is hard to match for stream processing.

I write and deploy brand new perl code in 2022 to replace some clunky python and javascript - for real! AMA!

Re: Not Your Grandfather’s Perl

#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 LOC of Perl and counting here. Bless you, Larry Wall and Perl maintainers. Keep it up!

Re: Not Your Grandfather’s Perl

#5
I'd argue perl's major value is from stability in the sense that what the perl developers write today can be run on the perl available on any machine, new or old. If a lot of perl developers end up use'ing lots of these new features that feeling of compatiblity will go away.

Re: Not Your Grandfather’s Perl

#6

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…

> 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.

I don't write much Perl these days and haven't for some time, but it's still what I might reach for if I were tasked with writing something suitable for a scripting language that had to run with ~0 operational or upgrade/maintenance budget for a decade or more in environments I wouldn't necessarily be able to control or influence, or else [bad thing will happen].

Re: Not Your Grandfather’s Perl

#10
post #3

Even on modern hardware with vectorization, the speed of perl is hard to match for stream processing. I write and deploy brand new perl code in 2022 to replace some clunky python and javascript - for real! AMA!

1. What's your top technique for keeping it fast?

2. Are you hiring?

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