4 ms·
A lot of my colleagues in NLP and text processing still prefer to write in Perl. Granted they are mostly the old guard but it is prevalent in academic language
by gillesjacobs 7y ago
A lot of my colleagues in NLP and text processing still prefer to write in Perl. Granted they are mostly the old guard but it is prevalent in academic language technology research.
- julienfr112 7y agoSpacy, the new kid on the block, is in python...
- gillesjacobs 7y agoThere are many more tasks in NLP than what SpaCy offers even though it is a nice API. I use SpaCy near daily, but academic research goes beyond NER, dep parsing and PoS tagging. For instance, [1] is a tool for text-to-pictograph translation system I worked on. The core engine is entirely written in Perl 5. [1] http://picto.ccl.kuleuven.be/index_engspa.php http://picto.ccl.kuleuven.be/index_engspa.php
- julienfr112 7y agoYou are indeed taking your fair share of the trend ...
- make3 7y ago.. in the old guard of language technology research I guess, because in my NLP lab, no one knows the first thing about Perl (everything is done in Python)
- proverbialbunny 7y agoMore than that. I wrote my first machine learning project in Perl. Perl 5 is better than Python in many ways, but worse in other ways. Raku seems to have none of the downsides Perl 5 had, but all of the upsides. Raku looks like it could be a valid replacement for Python in the ML space. Also, back then, Perl 5 had better libraries than Python. Though, that was quite a while ago.
- ttkciar 7y agoWe don't have an "NLP lab" here, but when my project required NLP solutions, perl delivered quite nicely.