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Perl5 is a great language. For internet and system related tasks it is great! It was created long time ago and evolved over the years. One thing is true, it ha

Perl5 is a great language. For internet and system related tasks it is great! It was created long time ago and evolved over the years. One thing is true, it had a lot of advantage over other languages for a lot of years. However, now in 2018, other languages have also evolved and gained a lot of traction. One example is javascript/node which is now being used more and more. For a lot of time, a lot of frontend focused developers didnt really want to try backend development... specially because backend development was usually done in another language which was not javascript. So some never really attempted to do backend development. However when node was released, that opened a lot of new opportunities for the front end developers. There are a lot of languages these days and many of them are capable enough to do many types of projects. The important thing is, some languages have a bigger concentration of more capable engineers. One of these languages is perl. The perl programmers are excelent. They have real close experience with the kernel and systems and usually have great experience in complex backend tasks. Many are not as great with front end development. Some are. Some projects can be done and deployed by 1 single perl developer. The same project if done in java for example might require more than 1 java developer. The microsoft language creates a bubble and their developers sometimes dont know universal technical terms, they only know the microsoftish terms. Ie. they might not know what a "web server" is, but they know what "IIS" is. They might now know what a "hash" is, but they know what a "dictionary" is. Perl developers use universal terms. Amazingly, javascript, especially ES6 is looking more and more like perl. Those that know both will agree sometimes it reminds of perl. There are many projects people dont know about that use perl behind the scenes. But of course there are not as many perl programmers as there are in other languages and thats one reason you dont hear much about these projects. Companies embrace more and more the modern perl development. Java, microsoft, node, python, ruby, etc are more popular of course. Specially because a lot of banks use java and they push java via universities. In the past I have seen labs with SUN machines on universities that teach Java. Microsoft also gives students free software licenses via universities. Thats another reason Microsoft and Java are very popular.

deleted 8y ago
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malkia 8y ago
Actually Perl seems to be used quite a lot at Microsoft. Look at page 3 in this publication: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/wp-content/uploads/2016/06/q_signed-2.pdf https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/wp-content/uploads/...
- ty_a 8y ago
  Perl was considered as the defacto scripting language in Windows until they settled on PowerShell.
  - smacktoward 8y ago
    cough VBScript cough
  - jug 8y ago
    How come? It didn’t ship with WSH but (only) JScript and VBScript did.
    - gaius 8y ago
      De facto, not de jure. Perl’s COM module was excellent and made Windows very scriptable. This was back in the 90s.
  - malkia 8y ago
    I also remember quite a lot of Perl script in the WDK (Windows Driver Kit) back then. Was surprised by it that there were so many perl hackers @ Microsoft.
wink 8y ago
I saw the light[tm] too late. My only real dealing was ~2001 and fixing shitty cgi-bin-webscripts in Perl. PHP4 was a huge improvement over that :) As the years went on and I did more admin work I've come to really enjoy having perl5 available basically anywhere - the power of python with the availability of shell scripts.. but without the hassle. I'm also kinda sad they didn't write puppet in Perl but chose Ruby. I bet it would have prevented all my "too slow" and "needs too much RAM" problems with it...
- donavanm 8y ago
  My memories over a decade old here but ... as I recall there was an early perl based protopuppet that luke wrote and used in his consulting roles in the early 2000s. This was after splitting from cfengine and moving towards a declarative model. For better or worse Ruby really does seem a good fit for the puppet use case. A flexible DSL for expressing config intent, coupled with a very extensible/inheritance based parse & apply model.
aasasd 8y ago
Ironically, the universal terms for ‘hashes’ are ‘map,’ ‘associative array’ or, at the worst, ‘table.’ Even ‘dictionary’ makes sense and is definitely used outside of MS. Hashes are completely different things, the use of them is an implementation detail and not necessary.
- CydeWeys 8y ago
  OK, I'll bite. How do you get O(1) lookup without using a hashtable?
  - outadoc 8y ago
    That's not the issue. If you have a Dictionary interface that says it provides you with O(1) lookup, you don't care if it uses a hashtable or magic dust to do it.
    - CydeWeys 8y ago
      My point is that, since a hashtable is the only way to provide the desired performance characteristics, it's not unreasonable at all to say "I want a hashtable", instead of "I want a Dictionary implementation with O(1) lookup". The former is more succinct.
      - outadoc 8y ago
        I get ya, but I think you just described abstraction. Sure, if we're speaking low-level, we might as well use "hashtable".
        CydeWeys 8y ago
        When someone says "hashtable" in the context of writing software, they're most often specifying desired performance characteristics, not the specific implementation details. This is how Perl does it, for example. Also, there are Map implementations that don't have these performance characteristics, e.g. a TreeMap in Java which internally uses a red/black tree and thus provides logarithmic lookup and insertion. If I'm writing something that needs to do a lot of efficient lookups but only write "Map" in the spec, there's danger that the wrong thing will be used, and performance will suffer. It really does need a hashtable, not just a generic lookup interface.
ricardobeat 8y ago
There are no “universal” terms. You used hash as an example, that’s already less universal than calling it a dictionary - it’s a hash map/table, and I’ve only ever heard this term from Perl developers.
- collyw 8y ago
  Java always had hash maps as one of their map implementations. (I did use both languages years ago, so maybe that's why I noticed)
  - CydeWeys 8y ago
    For what it's worth, the three main Java map implementations are HashMap, which does what it says on the time, LinkedHashMap, which has some additional pointers to maintain insertion order (and thus has performance that suffers by a constant factor), and TreeMap, which is really a red/black tree which thus offers logarithmic lookup time instead of constant lookup time (i.e. it's not a hashtable at all).
- rurban 8y ago
  That's because perl developers knew lisp and functional languages before and therefore avoided the misleading term "map", which is an operator to apply a function on a vector (=array) or list since the late 50ies. a map vs to map is misleading. "table" is shorter than "dictionary" and also describes the structure better. A dictionary is mostly a book, or a list of keys (/usr/share/dict). prolog also used the term "table" or "tabling" for its caching of backtrackings, what we would call "memoize" or memoization via a hash table.
  - kazinator 8y ago
    > perl developers knew lisp and functional languages It's a practical certainty that the vast majority do not, and its design (up to Perl 5, at least) smacks of total Lisp ignorance. "Map" is used in mathematics as a kind of synonym for "function", especially from some arbitrary set to another one. If you assign the domain < 1, 2, 3, 4 > to the range < 3, 2, 4, 1 >, that's a map. We can draw it as two bubbles containing labeled dots, and draw arrows between the bubbles. This sense of "map" is widely used in computing. For instance "keyboard scan codes get mapped to characters" or "a coordinate in the abstract canvas get mapped to the viewport, which is mapped to the screen" or "the temperature sensor is mapped to GPIO-s 13 to 17." The "map" in Lisp's mapcar is exactly this sense. The map is the function that is being applied: mapcar is using the verb sense: take the car of every cell through the function: i.e. map each domain value to the range. This is called "projection" or "mapping"; "map" is just the verb describing what happens to each individual element.
singingfish 8y ago
The thing about perl which people really don't appreciate is that it scales. From a thow-away oneliner to a few hundred thousand lines of code [1]. But achieving that coherently takes a depth of knowledge of the language[2] and a reluctance to reinvent the wheel. My main problems with perl is that I haven't found any normal programming activity I can't do with it, and that it's sucked enough of my time up over the past decade that people pay me and give me good working conditions in which to use it. [1] But if you get to "a few hundred thousand lines of code" it's likely that there's some significant architectural mistake in your code. Architectural mistakes are not a perl-specific thing. Perl's biggest strength is also its biggest weakness - it's flexible. [2] Depth of knowledge of a language is something that seems to be quite unfashionable in the industry at the moment, and some of perl's design decisions seem to be optimised for a style of knowledge that's also unfashionable.
- totalperspectiv 8y ago
  Could you elaborate on point 2 there? I think that's an interesting point. I think it fits with a theme I've been mulling over regarding more people being tool users than tool builders.
  - singingfish 8y ago
    Most decent computer languages are heavily inspired by theoretical linguistics. So education tends towards that. Perl is inspired by practical linguistics. It's a total mess like English and amazingly expressive like English. This doesn't fit well with standard computing paradigms, but it does make perl a decent language for people from non-standard backgrounds.
    - lizmat 8y ago
      > perl a decent language for people from non-standard backgrounds I would argue "for any background". Why would you have to think like a computer to be able to program? Don't we have computers to do that?

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

malkia 8y ago

Actually Perl seems to be used quite a lot at Microsoft. Look at page 3 in this publication: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/wp-content/uploads/2016/06/q_signed-2.pdf https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/wp-content/uploads/...

ty_a 8y ago
Perl was considered as the defacto scripting language in Windows until they settled on PowerShell.
- smacktoward 8y ago
  cough VBScript cough
- jug 8y ago
  How come? It didn’t ship with WSH but (only) JScript and VBScript did.
  - gaius 8y ago
    De facto, not de jure. Perl’s COM module was excellent and made Windows very scriptable. This was back in the 90s.
- malkia 8y ago
  I also remember quite a lot of Perl script in the WDK (Windows Driver Kit) back then. Was surprised by it that there were so many perl hackers @ Microsoft.

wink 8y ago

I saw the light[tm] too late. My only real dealing was ~2001 and fixing shitty cgi-bin-webscripts in Perl. PHP4 was a huge improvement over that :) As the years went on and I did more admin work I've come to really enjoy having perl5 available basically anywhere - the power of python with the availability of shell scripts.. but without the hassle. I'm also kinda sad they didn't write puppet in Perl but chose Ruby. I bet it would have prevented all my "too slow" and "needs too much RAM" problems with it...

donavanm 8y ago
My memories over a decade old here but ... as I recall there was an early perl based protopuppet that luke wrote and used in his consulting roles in the early 2000s. This was after splitting from cfengine and moving towards a declarative model. For better or worse Ruby really does seem a good fit for the puppet use case. A flexible DSL for expressing config intent, coupled with a very extensible/inheritance based parse & apply model.

aasasd 8y ago

Ironically, the universal terms for ‘hashes’ are ‘map,’ ‘associative array’ or, at the worst, ‘table.’ Even ‘dictionary’ makes sense and is definitely used outside of MS. Hashes are completely different things, the use of them is an implementation detail and not necessary.

CydeWeys 8y ago
OK, I'll bite. How do you get O(1) lookup without using a hashtable?
- outadoc 8y ago
  That's not the issue. If you have a Dictionary interface that says it provides you with O(1) lookup, you don't care if it uses a hashtable or magic dust to do it.
  - CydeWeys 8y ago
    My point is that, since a hashtable is the only way to provide the desired performance characteristics, it's not unreasonable at all to say "I want a hashtable", instead of "I want a Dictionary implementation with O(1) lookup". The former is more succinct.
    - outadoc 8y ago
      I get ya, but I think you just described abstraction. Sure, if we're speaking low-level, we might as well use "hashtable".
      - CydeWeys 8y ago
        When someone says "hashtable" in the context of writing software, they're most often specifying desired performance characteristics, not the specific implementation details. This is how Perl does it, for example. Also, there are Map implementations that don't have these performance characteristics, e.g. a TreeMap in Java which internally uses a red/black tree and thus provides logarithmic lookup and insertion. If I'm writing something that needs to do a lot of efficient lookups but only write "Map" in the spec, there's danger that the wrong thing will be used, and performance will suffer. It really does need a hashtable, not just a generic lookup interface.

ricardobeat 8y ago

There are no “universal” terms. You used hash as an example, that’s already less universal than calling it a dictionary - it’s a hash map/table, and I’ve only ever heard this term from Perl developers.

collyw 8y ago
Java always had hash maps as one of their map implementations. (I did use both languages years ago, so maybe that's why I noticed)
- CydeWeys 8y ago
  For what it's worth, the three main Java map implementations are HashMap, which does what it says on the time, LinkedHashMap, which has some additional pointers to maintain insertion order (and thus has performance that suffers by a constant factor), and TreeMap, which is really a red/black tree which thus offers logarithmic lookup time instead of constant lookup time (i.e. it's not a hashtable at all).
rurban 8y ago
That's because perl developers knew lisp and functional languages before and therefore avoided the misleading term "map", which is an operator to apply a function on a vector (=array) or list since the late 50ies. a map vs to map is misleading. "table" is shorter than "dictionary" and also describes the structure better. A dictionary is mostly a book, or a list of keys (/usr/share/dict). prolog also used the term "table" or "tabling" for its caching of backtrackings, what we would call "memoize" or memoization via a hash table.
- kazinator 8y ago
  > perl developers knew lisp and functional languages It's a practical certainty that the vast majority do not, and its design (up to Perl 5, at least) smacks of total Lisp ignorance. "Map" is used in mathematics as a kind of synonym for "function", especially from some arbitrary set to another one. If you assign the domain < 1, 2, 3, 4 > to the range < 3, 2, 4, 1 >, that's a map. We can draw it as two bubbles containing labeled dots, and draw arrows between the bubbles. This sense of "map" is widely used in computing. For instance "keyboard scan codes get mapped to characters" or "a coordinate in the abstract canvas get mapped to the viewport, which is mapped to the screen" or "the temperature sensor is mapped to GPIO-s 13 to 17." The "map" in Lisp's mapcar is exactly this sense. The map is the function that is being applied: mapcar is using the verb sense: take the car of every cell through the function: i.e. map each domain value to the range. This is called "projection" or "mapping"; "map" is just the verb describing what happens to each individual element.

singingfish 8y ago

The thing about perl which people really don't appreciate is that it scales. From a thow-away oneliner to a few hundred thousand lines of code [1]. But achieving that coherently takes a depth of knowledge of the language[2] and a reluctance to reinvent the wheel. My main problems with perl is that I haven't found any normal programming activity I can't do with it, and that it's sucked enough of my time up over the past decade that people pay me and give me good working conditions in which to use it. [1] But if you get to "a few hundred thousand lines of code" it's likely that there's some significant architectural mistake in your code. Architectural mistakes are not a perl-specific thing. Perl's biggest strength is also its biggest weakness - it's flexible. [2] Depth of knowledge of a language is something that seems to be quite unfashionable in the industry at the moment, and some of perl's design decisions seem to be optimised for a style of knowledge that's also unfashionable.

totalperspectiv 8y ago
Could you elaborate on point 2 there? I think that's an interesting point. I think it fits with a theme I've been mulling over regarding more people being tool users than tool builders.
- singingfish 8y ago
  Most decent computer languages are heavily inspired by theoretical linguistics. So education tends towards that. Perl is inspired by practical linguistics. It's a total mess like English and amazingly expressive like English. This doesn't fit well with standard computing paradigms, but it does make perl a decent language for people from non-standard backgrounds.
  - lizmat 8y ago
    > perl a decent language for people from non-standard backgrounds I would argue "for any background". Why would you have to think like a computer to be able to program? Don't we have computers to do that?