bwarp

They'll be working in call centres next year.

Perl is not the root of all things. I think you'll find computer science got there first.

As for associative arrays and regular expressions, I think Perl blatantly nicked those from awk!

The problem I have is that Perl is the "jack of all trades, yet the master of none".

I'm fed up of the Perl monk(|ie)s preaching like religious nutbags every 5 minutes. I'm tired of hearing it. I'm tired of oh perl is jesus' sandals.

It's a WAS not an IS.

use English in itself is a sign of much turdyness.

I rarely use Perl CGI. I haven't since about 2002.

Regarding C# and Java startup. It's not an issue. You can warm start appdomains/JVMs. We do this.

Once it's running, both Java and C# run rings around most things.

CPAN is a mess of poor maintenance and poor documentation. It's also painfully coupled to everything.

Perl is monolithic. There is too much in the core.

I've read large chunks of HOP whilst tryingand I just can see how some things are pooly shoehorned into the language. Some of the tricks with the reference semantics are horrible.

Java and C# do Regex and Unicode better than Perl. Go does unicode better than Perl. The API in C# is not much more verbose and the RE implementation is significantly faster. It's also much easier to unit test.

Perl has too much syntax - so much so it doesn't fit in your head.

I think Perl has a nostalgic attraction but that is it.

Oh FFS. Everything has a barrier to entry. Just work with it until you get over it.

People want instant gratification these days. It takes time to understand stuff.

The Internet (and crappy TV about popstars and shit) has lead to people having completely unrealistic expectations of everything.

I'll probably get downvoted for this. I know Perl very well which is why I don't use it.

I disagree with you...

If UNIX was a schizophrenic, paranoid, indecisive, eclectic, personality-disorder equipped operating system, then you'd be right but it's not. It's pretty well thought out (I exclude Linux from that which is a right mess).

Perl is not a natural evolution of, but a putrid mishmash of shell, sed, awk, tr, cat etc bundled into an incongruous monolithic blob with groupies from the cult of CPAN knocking off the edge cases left right and centre when it doesn't do what you want (using bits of C in some cases!!).

Perl is not the UNIX philosophy of small tools and loose coupling. It's entirely the opposite: A monolithic turd that just won't flush.

DuckDuckGo was probably built in Perl beause the individual who built it probably knew Perl. You could build DDG in C# or Java if you really wanted! (and it'd spend less time waiting for the Perl interpreter to tick).

What abstractions in particular? I'm interested from the perspective of resolving any issues in that space.

It is statically typed and non interactive. I'm not sure I could get on with that as a scripting language.

My father has some HD650s and I found that they make my head too hot :(

I used perl for about 5 years for general scripting tasks. It's not about there being too many ways to do something for me, it's that you need to know the subtlety of each one and cryptic abbreviations.

I've got a pair of Sennheiser HD-25 SP-II headphones (they are monitor headphones and spend a fair amount of time whacked into the front of a Korg Trinity). I paid 30 GBP for them in 2004. I've replaced the cable once for 20GBP after repeatedly running over it with a desk chair for 5 years and replaced the earpads once for about 10GBP.

I would not swap them for anything.

They run rings around headphones which are 5-10x the cost. Rumor has it they piss on 1KGBP headphones. They sound much better than HD280s as well (I've had some as well). The frequency response is pretty much 100% linear. They are very comfortable. They block out pretty much everything. Most importantly you just cannot hear any static/noise on them at all.

They are godlike.

Unfortunately they change hands for a hell of a lot of money now otherwise I'd grab another pair :(

Well that just makes me go WTF.

I genuinely can't think of a way this will be used which will be positive for PHP.

Unless it ships with Visual Studio, I doubt I'll ever see it.

Good stuff!

However, another thing I'm not going to get to use whilst working in a Microsoft monoculture :(

Several thousand years later... http://www.terrybisson.com/page6/page6.html

I've not found one yet! If anyone has any suggestions I'd love to know.

I tend to find that Go is so multi-paradigm that it fits all my use cases well. It's a perfect high and low level language, fits entirely in your head, has decent testing support, scales code-quantity wise very well and is very fast.

It traditionally replaces all the areas I'd use Python, C# and C beforehand.

I see less requirement for "picking a language for the job" thanks to this.

It only sucks as a shell scripting language for which I use sh.

Yes they are. But only from new businesses looking to cut costs. In older businesses, Office is entrenched and there's no getting away from it.

Ha that is so true.

Ironically I just posted a rant against that crap:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3628371

Downvoted by a git fanboy...

Apart from the large chunk of us who don't do open source stuff and manage products with it.

Github brings us no benefit then.

I have found the same things, even recently.

Git for windows basically brings half of MinGW with it including a shell and pisses up your windows cmd settings terribly. There is no platform abstraction layer in Git, so you're stuck with dragging GNU with you (it's not even POSIX compliant).

Mercurial is far more respectiful as it uses Python as the platform abstraction layer, uses windows semantics quite happily and considered Windows very early on.

Mercurial is just more polished on Windows.

Also the IDE integration and tooling on Windows is an order of magnitude better. It just works with no fannying around.

Add to that it's considerably less cryptic than Git and it's won.

Until you are replaced with a very small shell script...

Just the title puts me off that. Sounds like a video for a recruitment agent who thinks they're being cool and in with the kids...

Rubbish - your head is in the clouds. This is the real world where we solve problems with the tools we know and work on a common ground to everyone else.

I get the feeling a lot of people on HN just fell out of university or work in a niche area. The rest of us don't care for such isolation and prefer to work with deterministic and well known tooling.

<sarcasm>

If that is the case, then the summation operator in mathematics should be replaced with Lambda Calculus or the world will fall apart...

Linux obviously doesn't work because it uses for loops in the Kernel.

Windows needs to be rewritten in Haskell or LISP to make it pure.

OMG I just realised, I'm not allowed to walk a list in C without implementing car and struct pair. Damn my stack just blew.

</sarcasm>

I've dumped all extensions - I had R# and VisualSVN.

The solution does have about 80,000 files though.

This is all language astronauts. There's nowt wrong with the for loop for most cases I can think of.

Closures are way more expensive if you include the call overhead.

Sure it looks all pretty, but have they made it faster and more reliable?

VS2010 is just damn slow and falls over on me at least 2-3 times a day which is not acceptable. When you pay for 25 VS2010 premium licenses with MSDN on top of your gold partner allowance, you expect it to work.

No I will not use Chrome.

Firefox 10.0.2 on Windows 7 X64. Only addon is adblock plus.

Clicking "python (beta)" at the top results in a stop script after about 10 seconds.