4 ms·

I always felt that programming in perl was fun. Fun don't pay the bills though so over time I programmed less in perl. I suspect that with the perl 6 release a

by xlm1717 11y ago

I always felt that programming in perl was fun. Fun don't pay the bills though so over time I programmed less in perl. I suspect that with the perl 6 release a lot of people are starting to go back to it and having fun with it again. And like the author mentions, they improved on a lot of things with perl 6.

nickysielicki 11y ago
> Fun don't pay the bills though so over time I programmed less in perl. I think a lot of sysadmins have made their living by writing perl for the majority of their career. Certainly there are more people writing perl today than lisp, golang, rust, or haskell.
- AndyNemmity 11y ago
  We used to make our living writing perl, but many of us moved on to python after so many missteps in release of perl 6. The question to me is, is there a reason to go back to perl? I don't know the answer.
  - hahainternet 11y ago
    Every single annoyance you can find with Python seems thoroughly addressed. Try it and see. Let someone know if there's still major pain points and the #perl6 community would love to hear it.
    - logicallee 11y ago
      joke's on you, I don't have a single annoyance in Python.
      - hahainternet 11y ago
        You mix in some classes. One of those classes overwrites a method from another. How will you know? There you go. Now you do have an annoyance with Python.
      - kbenson 11y ago
        I wouldn't consider that a good thing. No language is perfect, so if you have no annoyances with a language, you either don't know the language well enough, aren't doing anything interesting enough to run into the annoyances, or lack enough experience in other languages to know what could be better. But I know you're just being flippant. ;)
- oldmanjay 11y ago
  Admins were a bandaid for the period where insufficiently advanced software existed. The generally obstructionist principles of the profession combined with the complete lack of discipline in constructing those aforementioned Perl scripts spells doom that we (as an industry) are busily automating out of existence. Basically, fun was had, but fun was not what anyone needed. Anyway, that is my little digression.
  - nickysielicki 11y ago
    I don't think so. Companies don't employ sysadmins because they need them to do anything particularly novel that the software engineers couldn't do themselves, they hire them for the liability they provide, and the capability to poke into the running system and figure out what's going on. I don't see unikernels or docker or whatever sufficiently advanced software you're referring to replacing that.
  - cuckcuckspruce 11y ago
    >The generally obstructionist principles of the profession combined with the complete lack of discipline in constructing those aforementioned Perl scripts spells doom that we (as an industry) are busily automating out of existence. This is probably the most arrogant statement I've heard on Hacker News as somebody who has worn both the software engineer and sysadmin hat. "Obstructionism" is what engineers, decoupled as they are from the realities of the hardware by their VMs and containers call "due diligence". As a sysadmin, I need to be assured and ensure what you want from the software ecosystem around the ball of lint you pushed onto me will not affect other line of business applications that make the company money. That is what I am hired to do, along with fixing the whole mess when it breaks. So a little due diligence and research is necessary to make sure that everything still runs. The reason that many of the Perl scripts a sysadmin writes show "complete lack of discipline" is also a testament to the "ooh, shiny!" mentality of many engineers. We already have a database system for reporting, so why are you scribbling out report files? We have an automated system for dealing with system restarts and service restarts, so why are you doing it in the non-standard way? Remember, by the time I see your code it's too late - it's already written and has been approved by management, and rewriting it or changing it is too expensive at this point so I have to work around your complete lack of regard for the standards that keep things running. Just something to keep in mind next time you complain about "obstruction" and "inconsistency". I only put into place what you make, so perhaps you should spend some time looking in the mirror.
latenightcoding 11y ago
> Fun don't pay the bills though Not true at all. Thanks to perl I have been working high paying jobs from home since I was 19. And I always get banks or other big companies contacting me because they need a UNIX/Perl programmer or a sysadmin

by xlm1717 11y ago

nickysielicki 11y ago

> Fun don't pay the bills though so over time I programmed less in perl. I think a lot of sysadmins have made their living by writing perl for the majority of their career. Certainly there are more people writing perl today than lisp, golang, rust, or haskell.

AndyNemmity 11y ago
We used to make our living writing perl, but many of us moved on to python after so many missteps in release of perl 6. The question to me is, is there a reason to go back to perl? I don't know the answer.
- hahainternet 11y ago
  Every single annoyance you can find with Python seems thoroughly addressed. Try it and see. Let someone know if there's still major pain points and the #perl6 community would love to hear it.
  - logicallee 11y ago
    joke's on you, I don't have a single annoyance in Python.
    - hahainternet 11y ago
      You mix in some classes. One of those classes overwrites a method from another. How will you know? There you go. Now you do have an annoyance with Python.
    - kbenson 11y ago
      I wouldn't consider that a good thing. No language is perfect, so if you have no annoyances with a language, you either don't know the language well enough, aren't doing anything interesting enough to run into the annoyances, or lack enough experience in other languages to know what could be better. But I know you're just being flippant. ;)
oldmanjay 11y ago
Admins were a bandaid for the period where insufficiently advanced software existed. The generally obstructionist principles of the profession combined with the complete lack of discipline in constructing those aforementioned Perl scripts spells doom that we (as an industry) are busily automating out of existence. Basically, fun was had, but fun was not what anyone needed. Anyway, that is my little digression.
- nickysielicki 11y ago
  I don't think so. Companies don't employ sysadmins because they need them to do anything particularly novel that the software engineers couldn't do themselves, they hire them for the liability they provide, and the capability to poke into the running system and figure out what's going on. I don't see unikernels or docker or whatever sufficiently advanced software you're referring to replacing that.
- cuckcuckspruce 11y ago
  >The generally obstructionist principles of the profession combined with the complete lack of discipline in constructing those aforementioned Perl scripts spells doom that we (as an industry) are busily automating out of existence. This is probably the most arrogant statement I've heard on Hacker News as somebody who has worn both the software engineer and sysadmin hat. "Obstructionism" is what engineers, decoupled as they are from the realities of the hardware by their VMs and containers call "due diligence". As a sysadmin, I need to be assured and ensure what you want from the software ecosystem around the ball of lint you pushed onto me will not affect other line of business applications that make the company money. That is what I am hired to do, along with fixing the whole mess when it breaks. So a little due diligence and research is necessary to make sure that everything still runs. The reason that many of the Perl scripts a sysadmin writes show "complete lack of discipline" is also a testament to the "ooh, shiny!" mentality of many engineers. We already have a database system for reporting, so why are you scribbling out report files? We have an automated system for dealing with system restarts and service restarts, so why are you doing it in the non-standard way? Remember, by the time I see your code it's too late - it's already written and has been approved by management, and rewriting it or changing it is too expensive at this point so I have to work around your complete lack of regard for the standards that keep things running. Just something to keep in mind next time you complain about "obstruction" and "inconsistency". I only put into place what you make, so perhaps you should spend some time looking in the mirror.

latenightcoding 11y ago

> Fun don't pay the bills though Not true at all. Thanks to perl I have been working high paying jobs from home since I was 19. And I always get banks or other big companies contacting me because they need a UNIX/Perl programmer or a sysadmin