I was a perl enthusiast in the day. But those times are long gone. But I must agree when in a pinch and I need string manipulation or some quick script that is just bit to complicated for bash to handle I'll write some perl :)
As a "not old" Perl programmer, I am puzzled by all these old-timers who feel the need to say they "aren't into Perl anymore." That's fine. I'm not into Windows anymore, but I don't go around telling everyone :)
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 :)
It's no more puzzling than the people who keep on trying to bring perl into every conversation, make sure there is some mostly irrelevant perl story on the front page, etc.
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.
Absolutely you are right that it's results that matter. I use a lot of programming languages, and I never feel the need to love or hate on any of them.
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)?
>it seems to me it is the naysayers who are doing that.
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).
Please don't say that. The people who are into it are too loud as it is. If someone popped up every now and then and said "Yea, it was a great ride into work this morning with my horse & buggy." Of course most people's response is going to be "hrm, yea I've rode in one of those before but it doesn't make much practical sense now".
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.
>>I am puzzled by all these old-timers who feel the need to say they "aren't into Perl anymore." That's fine. I'm not into Windows anymore, but I don't go around telling everyone :)
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.
I have to agree. I don't really mind seeing articles like this on HN sometimes and I confess I submit some articles like this at times. The discussion here is what I am really interested in.
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.
Did you actually look at the article? It's just some random guy doing some scripting. He's not using any modern perl stuff so it's not interesting for perl fans. It's certainly not interesting for the rest of us who don't care about perl. What's the point?
Did it last week. Been tooling around with Ruby (MacRuby actually), and had a data processing task that required round tripping to Excel - CPAN to the rescue.
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.
Everyone involved is on a Mac, and the ruby code to control Excel is OLE based, thus Windows only. Also, the files are .xls, which doesn't have a writer method in ruby (that I'm aware of), although there is an .xlsx library.
Perl's ParseExcel and WriteExcel worked great in this case, and easily handle edge cases like leading zeros on zipcodes, formatting directives, etc.
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.
This article is actually quite revealing. The modern Perl movement clearly passed this guy by; this is clear from several statements in the article, beginning with his second sentence. Perl is just seen as it was ten years ago.
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.
I didn't mean what he said was, I meant posting it here was. It's 5 paragraphs about some guy scripting. Who cares? Are we going to start posting Yahoo answers about perl next? How about IRC logs?
You know, the Perl community could just release Perl 6 finally so they had the "shiny new language" to point to whenever someone talks about the old days of Perl.
I can't speak for the grandparent of this comment, but I'd like to see a Perl 6 release that is actually competitive with perl5 and python in a production setting. Last I heard, the Perl 6 implementations were still very slow, and lacking significant functionality specified in the Synopses.
Until such a release happens, Perl 6 is a nice idea, but not actually useful to me.
The latest version of perl is revision 5 version 12.
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.
Would it be allowed to "package" a library implemented in Perl as a component in an iPhone app? Lua is allowed for implementing "a part" of the functionality in many apps. What if the Perl libraries were packaged as source-less runtimes with the ability to compile of eval?
I wonder if he's returning to perl because its inherently a better language for parsing, or if he's just incredibly comfortable with the succinct regex and string parsing syntax in perl? I've found myself going back to perl, but usually because I know how to do it in perl and I'm too time-pressed to learn how to do it in python, shell scripting, or something else
Perl can definitely be more compact than Python for regex and parsing but I am surprised that he need to move from Ruby to Perl. Ruby borrows much of the regex and quote syntax from Perl.
I tried Perl and moved to Python. With Ruby, I really like what I see. Unfortunately, I have spent quite a bit of time with Python and know it too well to want to move.
Python and Ruby are more similar than they are different. They're like 2 chocolate bars hanging out in the store, sure one has peanuts and the other has caramel but at the end of the day they're both chocolate bars.
If you're happy with Python stick with it. They're both good languages.
I cannot agree with this more! I'm constantly suprised by the amount of Ruby vs Python arguments I see. There's only about 3 or 4 actual differences between the two.
(I started to list them, then realised I'd have to do more research to explain properly - and left it for now.)
Actually it has been Perl since 1987. The Practical Extraction and Report Language/Pathologically Eclectic Rubbish Lister joke has been part of the language from the start.
I certainly feel the same pull. My time on Hacker News has led me to pursue Python vigorously and I have found that there are certain things that Perl is just less verbose with. The thing that I don't like about it is that is so easy for n00bs to screw up and it's very easy to write poor Perl code. CPAN/easy_install... it's two jelly bellys in the same bag to me.
I'm not trying to start a war here. Python and Ruby both have their place. Just saying, this is a ruby users problem, generally speaking, not a python user's problem.
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.
I am not aware of a significant number of Ruby developers who jump back to Perl instead of writing Ruby libraries. I'm not sure where you got that impression from.
50 comments
[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 93.3 ms ] threadIt 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.
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.
http://spreadsheet.rubyforge.org/
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.
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.
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.)
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.