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Had they done it fifteen years earlier, I think Perl could have been the language to learn for Data Science. It still is a fantastic language to slice, clean up
by rubinelli 7y ago
Had they done it fifteen years earlier, I think Perl could have been the language to learn for Data Science. It still is a fantastic language to slice, clean up, and extract information from text files, and it was already very widely used in bioinformatics.
- 7thaccount 7y agoI don't think the name change was the problem here, rather it wasn't complete until recently.
- lilSebastian 7y agoSee the section about waiting for perl 6 before doing more work... http://blogs.perl.org/users/ovid/2019/08/is-perl-6-being-renamed.html http://blogs.perl.org/users/ovid/2019/08/is-perl-6-being-ren...
- rz2k 7y ago"a fantastic language to slice, clean up, and extract information from text files, and it was already very widely used in bioinformatics" is a description of Perl 5, not Perl 6. Even if Perl 6 is completed, I don't think it is a practical workhorse for many real world situations. To me being able to create grammars in Perl 6 to parse text data sounds really compelling. However, every time I have played around with them, Perl 6 has been so slow, that I have reverted to using regular expressions in another language.
- kbenson 7y agoI'm pretty sure GP is referring to Perl 5, not the newly renamed Raku. Perl 5 had a lot of use in bioinformatics, and to my knowledge lasted quite a while after the general Perl exodus, until eventually being replaced by biopython. If the confusion regarding Perl 5/6 never happened, it might have retained that popularity in that domain.
- raldi 7y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Osborne_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Osborne_effect
- DonHopkins 7y agoYeah, with Perl 6 out of the way, they would have had 15 years to clean up the syntax of Perl 5 so it was no longer indistinguishable from line noise.
- jandrese 7y agoIMHO Perl's reputation for noisy code is mostly the result of code golf examples online and denoting variables with an explicit type character. A sanely written Perl program is nowhere near line noise. Compare to supposedly beautiful languages like Rust and the ratio of punctuation characters to alphanumeric is pretty much on par.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- AlexCoventry 7y agoPerl was built on a shaky foundation from the start. It was inevitable that it would collapse under its own weight.