Comment by SwellJoe | Hacker News Reader

Comment by SwellJoe | Hacker News Reader

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The whole references thing is the biggest pain in the ass in Perl syntax. List flattening, and the fact that arrays and hashes can only store scalars (or a reference to something else), etc. just expands into every nook and cranny of the language.

I still have a hard time with this aspect of the language after 10 years of Perl coding (with a three year break where I mostly worked with Python). And given how strong the tools in Perl are for working with hashes and arrays (grep, map, join, splice/unsplice, shift/unshift, sort, etc.) it really is a pain point. Perl 6 fixes many of the painful bits but not all.

But, nonetheless, I'm more productive in Perl than any other language. Partly because of the massive library of excellent pre-existing code, and partly because my problem domain almost always involves text parsing/processing and dealing with system-level data which are things for which Perl was designed.

And given how strong the tools in Perl are for working with hashes and arrays (grep, map, join, splice/unsplice, shift/unshift, sort, etc.) it really is a pain point.

Not really:

  my $ref  = [qw/foo bar baz/];
  my $ref2 = [map { uc } @$ref]; # [qw/FOO BAR BAZ/]

References, if anything, are just slightly ugly. I could live without non-reference values, however. They're basically useless, but sometimes they make the program more concise.

I think everyone realizes this mistake, however, and Perl6 only has types that behave like references:

  my @foo = split '/', "foo/bar/baz";
  function(@foo, 'hello');

  sub function(@foo, $string){ ... }

My point was that it is an additional bit of friction that isn't present in Ruby or Python (though they also have their own bits of friction). Even though I've written a lot of code in my life, I've never been a full-time software developer, and so it's one of the tricky bits that drops out of my head during the breaks in between writing code. I'm interacting with code written by someone very comfortable with these idioms, and so they show up all over the place, and I never quite get them right the first time. I just think it's an area that makes Perl trickier than it ought to be...it's not a deal breaker (PHP's lack of first class functions, for example, now that's a deal breaker). I'm basically a raving Perl fan, but arrays only holding scalars is a nuisance.

And, as I mentioned, Perl 6 goes a long way to correcting pretty much everything I don't like about Perl 5.

PHP's lack of first class functions

Thanks for that lil' tidbit.

It's the

    @{$h{$k}}

syntax that's fugly. +1 for Python.

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