4 ms·

What utility does Perl provide in a world dominated by python?

ncmncm 7y ago
Legit question. Movable Type is about the only blog framework not written in PHP. If you thought Perl was a bad language, PHP is way, way worse. And Movable Type is also the only one that can use Postgres for storage. I could not find any blog engine in Python.
- matthewowen 7y ago
  https://wagtail.io/ https://wagtail.io/
- smacktoward 7y ago
  There are static site generators written in Python you could use to publish a blog, like Pelican (https://blog.getpelican.com/ https://blog.getpelican.com/) and Lektor (https://www.getlektor.com/ https://www.getlektor.com/). But yeah, if you want software that works like WordPress and generates pages dynamically on the fly, I'm not sure there's any good Python-based alternatives. > If you thought Perl was a bad language, PHP is way, way worse In fairness to PHP, it's a lot better today than it used to be. (Though modern PHP would probably strike a Pythonista as too Java-ish.) And WordPress has had tons of engineering resources poured into it for a decade-plus now, whereas Movable Type has been maintained on a relative shoestring due to its fall from popularity.
  - ncmncm 7y ago
    It is hard to imagine why anyone would want to generate blog pages on the fly, but somehow it is what everyone does.
wumpus 7y ago
One thing perl provides is a few examples of how to handle utf-8 better than Python does. To put this another way, my 10-year-old perl-based web crawler did not have a problem crawling websites with umlauts in the hostname. Python is fixing supporting that new 2008 standard next year.
eddyg 7y ago
Plenty. Read https://www.evanmiller.org/why-im-learning-perl-6.html https://www.evanmiller.org/why-im-learning-perl-6.html or the follow-up https://www.evanmiller.org/a-review-of-perl-6.html https://www.evanmiller.org/a-review-of-perl-6.html Or, Why Perl 6 is the "Game of Thrones" of programming languages: https://techbeacon.com/app-dev-testing/why-perl-6-game-thrones-programming-languages https://techbeacon.com/app-dev-testing/why-perl-6-game-thron... Lots more where those came from...
ttkciar 7y ago
Its runtime is quite a bit faster and enjoys a smaller memory footprint. It is also more amenable to "bash on steroids" scripting, and has a quarter-million canned solutions in CPAN. PyPi has caught up with CPAN in terms of sheer number of packages, but there are still a lot of differences in what those packages cover. You might find solutions in CPAN without a counterpart in PyPi. More narrowly, every time I deal with databases in python, I find myself missing perl's DBI, which provides the same API for all databases with a corresponding DBD. Python should get a similar universal database interface someday.
mhd 7y ago
The inverse could've been asked about Python ages ago.
emptybits 7y ago
I love Python and I don't see the subset of the world dominated by Python changing to Raku any time soon. But there are some things that made me smile and nod and want to read more about the language. Two, off the top of my head. 1. Raku treats math in a manner that wouldn't surprise a mathematician. Or grade school student, for that matter. Witness: $ python3 -c 'print(0.3 == 0.1 + 0.2)' False $ ruby -e 'puts 0.3 == 0.1 + 0.2' false $ perl6 -e 'say 0.3 == 0.1 + 0.2' True (Raku prefers rational to floating point math when possible, but of course you can force floating point if you prefer that behaviour.) 2. Concurrency is a language goal in Raku and I think that's notable, compared to Python. Parallelism, concurrency, and asynchrony including multi-core support.[1] [1] https://docs.perl6.org/language/concurrency https://docs.perl6.org/language/concurrency
- Grinnz 7y ago
  As a Perl programmer, this is basically a post I might have written (aside from knowing it's not dominant anymore :) One more really cool aspect is the first class Unicode support, which Perl can do but you have to work at it.
pvaldes 7y ago
Maybe creativity. Perl world has always been proud to be able to solve the same thing in twenty different, often arcane, ways. Sometimes this is a good trait, other not so. And Perl programs do not spontaneously decompose when copypasted also. And CPAN is still a very profitable gold mine to explore.

Legit question. Movable Type is about the only blog framework not written in PHP. If you thought Perl was a bad language, PHP is way, way worse. And Movable Type is also the only one that can use Postgres for storage. I could not find any blog engine in Python.

matthewowen 7y ago
https://wagtail.io/ https://wagtail.io/
smacktoward 7y ago
There are static site generators written in Python you could use to publish a blog, like Pelican (https://blog.getpelican.com/ https://blog.getpelican.com/) and Lektor (https://www.getlektor.com/ https://www.getlektor.com/). But yeah, if you want software that works like WordPress and generates pages dynamically on the fly, I'm not sure there's any good Python-based alternatives. > If you thought Perl was a bad language, PHP is way, way worse In fairness to PHP, it's a lot better today than it used to be. (Though modern PHP would probably strike a Pythonista as too Java-ish.) And WordPress has had tons of engineering resources poured into it for a decade-plus now, whereas Movable Type has been maintained on a relative shoestring due to its fall from popularity.
- ncmncm 7y ago
  It is hard to imagine why anyone would want to generate blog pages on the fly, but somehow it is what everyone does.

wumpus 7y ago

One thing perl provides is a few examples of how to handle utf-8 better than Python does. To put this another way, my 10-year-old perl-based web crawler did not have a problem crawling websites with umlauts in the hostname. Python is fixing supporting that new 2008 standard next year.

eddyg 7y ago

Plenty. Read https://www.evanmiller.org/why-im-learning-perl-6.html https://www.evanmiller.org/why-im-learning-perl-6.html or the follow-up https://www.evanmiller.org/a-review-of-perl-6.html https://www.evanmiller.org/a-review-of-perl-6.html Or, Why Perl 6 is the "Game of Thrones" of programming languages: https://techbeacon.com/app-dev-testing/why-perl-6-game-thrones-programming-languages https://techbeacon.com/app-dev-testing/why-perl-6-game-thron... Lots more where those came from...

ttkciar 7y ago

Its runtime is quite a bit faster and enjoys a smaller memory footprint. It is also more amenable to "bash on steroids" scripting, and has a quarter-million canned solutions in CPAN. PyPi has caught up with CPAN in terms of sheer number of packages, but there are still a lot of differences in what those packages cover. You might find solutions in CPAN without a counterpart in PyPi. More narrowly, every time I deal with databases in python, I find myself missing perl's DBI, which provides the same API for all databases with a corresponding DBD. Python should get a similar universal database interface someday.

mhd 7y ago

The inverse could've been asked about Python ages ago.

emptybits 7y ago

I love Python and I don't see the subset of the world dominated by Python changing to Raku any time soon. But there are some things that made me smile and nod and want to read more about the language. Two, off the top of my head. 1. Raku treats math in a manner that wouldn't surprise a mathematician. Or grade school student, for that matter. Witness: $ python3 -c 'print(0.3 == 0.1 + 0.2)' False $ ruby -e 'puts 0.3 == 0.1 + 0.2' false $ perl6 -e 'say 0.3 == 0.1 + 0.2' True (Raku prefers rational to floating point math when possible, but of course you can force floating point if you prefer that behaviour.) 2. Concurrency is a language goal in Raku and I think that's notable, compared to Python. Parallelism, concurrency, and asynchrony including multi-core support.[1] [1] https://docs.perl6.org/language/concurrency https://docs.perl6.org/language/concurrency

Grinnz 7y ago
As a Perl programmer, this is basically a post I might have written (aside from knowing it's not dominant anymore :) One more really cool aspect is the first class Unicode support, which Perl can do but you have to work at it.

pvaldes 7y ago

Maybe creativity. Perl world has always been proud to be able to solve the same thing in twenty different, often arcane, ways. Sometimes this is a good trait, other not so. And Perl programs do not spontaneously decompose when copypasted also. And CPAN is still a very profitable gold mine to explore.