I Keep Arriving Back at Perl
blog.sam-pointer.com
blog.sam-pointer.com
So the challenge for those of us who like Perl and would like to see better coding practices in the language is to spread the modern Perl word beyond the confines of the Perl echo chamber.
This clearly isn't happening yet: instead Perl is seen as an ancient language only good for knocking up a quick script in an emergency.
Oh, and loewenskind: if you had read the article, you'd see it's far from 'blatant fanboy nonsense'. At best it is a mean and backhanded compliment.
Until such a release happens, Perl 6 is a nice idea, but not actually useful to me.
Then I'll jump right in!
The 12 is the major version number.
There is also a separate language called perl6 that we steal ideas from. But while the perl and perl6 communities share a fair few members, they aren't really the same community.
If you find this confusing, I suggest you do what myself - and a number of the Rakudo Perl6 developers - are finding ourselves doing, and referring to the perl6 spec as "Camelia" instead to reduce the number of people confusing it with perl.
Because of it's age, there's just a greater number of codebases out there that can do esoteric and unusual stuff - I tend to think that languages that share easy interop through a shared runtime (Cocoa/Macruby, Java/Scala/JRuby, etc.) might be the future of that concept.
Perl's ParseExcel and WriteExcel worked great in this case, and easily handle edge cases like leading zeros on zipcodes, formatting directives, etc.
As always YMMV.
Makes you wonder how soon it'll be before languages that are out of favor but have great libraries written for them are mainly viewed as targets for mining ideas and techniques, like how the various open source kernel developers use each other's kernels as driver documentation.
I actually find that this is one of the weaknesses of ruby (vs python): People who prefer it also know perl and can stand working with perl. The python people can't stand perl largely, and make a billion python modules. So, we have lots of python modules duplicating perl modules cause after python, people were unwilling to return to perl.
"Yo Sam, what's the .pl file. Is that from a tool? Naw, the perl library is really nice...I'd have had to write the parser if I did it in Ruby"
Most of the Ruby developers I know are in their 30's and all but 2 know perl. That may be the difference.
I don't think I will ever go back, mostly because I love how Ruby does objects and it has a nicer syntax.
If you're happy with Python stick with it. They're both good languages.
(I started to list them, then realised I'd have to do more research to explain properly - and left it for now.)
It seems to me the people who "aren't into Perl anymore" were not the gurus who built CPAN. Maybe it's fair to say that Perl isn't that into you, either? (All in good fun :)
I wouldn't expect Hacker News to care much about the language, but rather what's being done. If you built a 10 story house would you be sure to mention what brand of hammer you used? I wouldn't, who cares. It's the act and the result that matters.
But regarding people who "bring Perl into every conversation," it seems to me it is the naysayers who are doing that. Disliking something is fine, but -mentioning- it all the time seems compulsive.
And then the original commenter is talking about "back in the day," so I guess this is a kind of reverse nostalgia (things were worse back then)?
At most, the "naysayers" can't be any more than the perl advocates. No one is going out of their way to post articles against perl. We just come out when someone posts yet another perl advocation piece.
>Disliking something is fine, but -mentioning- it all the time seems compulsive.
Liking something is fine, but -mentioning- it all the time seems compulsive.
>And then the original commenter is talking about "back in the day,"
For all intents and purposes, perl's time has come and gone. Right or wrong, just or unjust. That's just how it is. No amount of wishing or screaming "look at this, we can also do Rails-type stuff!" will change that. Of course when someone posts yet another perl plea for relevancy, people who used it back when it was the language wax sentimental. You'd get something similar if you posted about some new project with OS2 or BEOS or something (arguably better technologies in their day then the one that ended up winning).
NOTE: I'm not saying that perl is literally as obsolete as a horse & buggy but rather for most programmers to day it may as well be.
It helps to read the artice? Anyway, it's my goal to avoid "most programmers."
Some of them are language war trolls.
The rest... well, read some _old_ Perl code from 1999 or so (Nagios, maybe?). :-)
Modern Perl with the Perl 6 backports like Moose and other CPAN stuff is totally another thing.
I don't really know if it works better for most people to treat your computer language like something extensible, that can grow -- but still force people to learn old cruft, to handle that?
I know one thing: I love it, because it is fun. And I need that -- I hated my life when I worked for money in Java.
Edit: Grammar.
So what? Flagged. This is blatant fanboy nonsense. Nothing remotely of interest here.
Why not? It got me thinking. I often return to PHP, even for things like computer graphics. Everybody knows PHP is slow as hell with computer graphics. So why do I use PHP for it? My answer would be: quick results. No need to setup a project, framework or whatever. Just create an empty file and you are ready to prototype, create a dirty hack, create a quick fix, have a proof of concept.