Perl Already Won (programming.tudorconstantin.com)

The same guy (Larry Wall) who originally wrote Perl 1 to 5.6 is the one who is writing the spec (though not the implementations) for Perl 6. People let him do it out of respect, even though it's disastrous for Perl 5.

A short example from the recent Perl6 calendar[1]:

Perl5:

    package Timer;
    
    use Time::HiRes qw(gettimeofday tv_interval);
    use Mojo::Base -base;
    use experimental 'signatures', 'postderef';
    
    has _event_log  => sub { [] };
    has _start_time => sub { [ gettimeofday ] };
    
    sub record ($self, $event_description) {
        # record the event and timestamp
        my $event = {
            timestamp   => sprintf('%.3f', tv_interval($self->_start_time)),
            description => $event_description,
        };
        push($self->_event_log->@*, $event);
    }
    
    sub report ($self) {
        # render a full report
        my $report = '';
        foreach my $event ($self->_event_log->@*) {
            $report .= sprintf "[%s] %s\n", $event->{timestamp}, $event->{description};
        }
        return $report;
    }
    1;

    class Timer {
        has $!start-time;
        has @!event-log;
    
        method record ($event_description) {
            # initialise the start-time if this is the first time through
            $!start-time //= now;
            @!event-log.push({
                timestamp   => now - $!start-time,
                description => $event_description
            });
        }
        method report {
            my @report_lines;
            for @!event-log -> %event {
                 @report_lines.push("[%event<timestamp>.fmt("%.3f")] %event<description>");
            }
            return @report_lines.join("\n");
        }
    }

I hate to defend PHP, but they have removed some dangerous features. Over the years there have been a lot of dangerous hacks that were deprecated and eventually killed. register_globals was deliberately disabled, breaking a lot of old PHP. Magic quotes got removed (though PHP's morass of variable escaping is still a tar pit). PHP 6 (or maybe 7 depending on the number they decide to go with) will kill mysql in favor of mysqli which will help enforce the use of placeholders/prepared statements (you can still screw it up, but you have to work harder). They could do better, but they have been improving in removing dangerously broken features, and have broken back-compatibility over and over to do so. I actually hate PHP, but when I've had to use it, PHP 5.5/5.6 isn't nearly as dangerous/broken as PHP used to be (though it's still horrible).

Also, I'm not sure, but I believe, had the original hacks not been done in Perl, the authors (and others after them) would have had much less trouble untangling the mess and they wouldn't have had 10 year old bugs no one could fix.

I'm not sure this can be considered a bug.

I've fixed that bug in code as far back as 2000. There've been discussions on that anti-pattern on PerlMonks for at least a decade.

I understand your code is pseudocode, but I should note that the "." is considered string concatenation in Perl. My very first thought before reading too carefully was that the bug was that someone tried to concatenate strings instead of calling functions. :) But I kept in mind that this was pseudocodish.

Yes, my second thought was, "He says there is a bug here; I wonder if this is one of those cases where the function returns values in list context." For any experienced Perl programmer, this is a thing to be aware of, especially when calling functions in hash maps, not only because it may return multiple values but also because it may return NO values, which would match the "username" key with "password".

We may debate the pros and cons of list context, but it is one of the first features I teach new hires because it can catch people accustomed to other languages by surprise. Perl is not the only language to support this kind of feature; it is present in Ruby with the "splat" operator (*array).

> password => bcrypt(cgi.param("password"))

There's two glaring and obvious bugs right there that would be there if you did a straight port to any other language. Always validate user input. If you ran this with taint mode on in Perl it'd fail, so you wouldn't even need human eyes to look at it to spot the problem.

The main problem with the talk is that almost every single thing he says is wrong, except for that bug. He may have reported it, but he knows almost nothing about the language, and is complaining because he never actually learned Perl, but expects Perl to conform to his expectations.

The fact that he pretends he is correct makes it even worse, since it means he is spreading his ignorance and misconceptions to others who take it as fact.

He is like an english person complaining about the fact that pronouns are gendered in german.

1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8813479

2: Comment follows:

From the changelog of the latest release of Perl: "CGI has been upgraded from version 3.63 to 3.65. NOTE: CGI is deprecated and may be removed from a future version of Perl." You can still make arguments about list handling in Perl, but using a deprecated module, which has been understood by the community for years to be problematic and exists mostly for backwards compatibility, does not bolster your argument, it does the opposite.

Using large monolithic projects that were started 10+ years (Twiki: 1998, Movable Type: 2001, Bugzilla: open sourced by Mozilla in 1998) ago also doesn't lend itself well towards pointing out modern usage of Perl.

Feel free to make any argument you want, but you should use relevant examples if you hope to be taken seriously.

Yes, indeed, sexism in talks is bad. I stand with you to condemn it. Regardless, the talk could be good technically.

(I didn't downvote you.)

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