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An expert Perl user will always be able to show some nifty program that could never be replicated in another language, or would be ten times larger and full of
by jumpingmice 7y ago
An expert Perl user will always be able to show some nifty program that could never be replicated in another language, or would be ten times larger and full of bugs if it were. If you play to its strengths, it is amazing. There is no better language for ingesting text in ad hoc formats and generating formatted reports. Hence the name.
- tigershark 7y agoIt’s quite a bold claim, do you have an example?
- jumpingmice 7y agoNothing specific to which I can point but I’ve never seen a language with quite the utility of Perl’s format feature. https://perldoc.perl.org/perlform.html https://perldoc.perl.org/perlform.html
- agumonkey 7y agoI love string encoded logic. Not joking.
- autarch 7y agoThe Practical Extraction and Reporting Language thing is not Perl's name, it's just a backronym that Larry Wall came up with. My personal favorite backronym is Pathologically Eclectic Rubbish Lister (I say this as someone who really loves Perl).
- jumpingmice 7y agoFrom `perldoc perl`: """Perl officially stands for Practical Extraction and Report Language, except when it doesn't."""
- nocman 7y agoIt seems like you are arguing that because it is in the official docs, that is where the name 'Perl' came from, but that is not accurate. autarch is right, "Practical Extraction and Report Language" is a backronym --the language was named 'Perl' first, and that acronym (and others) were devised later ( see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perl#Name https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perl#Name ). Larry was originally going to include the 'a' and name the language 'Pearl'. However, at the time there was already a programming language named 'Pearl', so he changed the name to Perl ( again, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perl#Name https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perl#Name ). This can be verified from multiple sources, including the "Learning Perl" book ( see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perl#cite_note-57 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perl#cite_note-57 ).
- jumpingmice 7y agoIt can be a backronym and the official name at the same time. Your assertions are all true but your logic is faulty.
- nocman 7y agoSorry, just got back to this. I guess that depends on whether you consider an obviously tongue-in-cheek backronym to be "the official name". We obviously disagree on this point.