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I Keep Arriving Back at Perl
- toadi 16y agoI was a perl enthusiast in the day. But those times are long gone. But I must agree when in a pinch and I need string manipulation or some quick script that is just bit to complicated for bash to handle I'll write some perl :)
- rjbond3rd 16y agoAs a "not old" Perl programmer, I am puzzled by all these old-timers who feel the need to say they "aren't into Perl anymore." That's fine. I'm not into Windows anymore, but I don't go around telling everyone :) It seems to me the people who "aren't into Perl anymore" were not the gurus who built CPAN. Maybe it's fair to say that Perl isn't that into you, either? (All in good fun :)
- loewenskind 16y agoIt's no more puzzling than the people who keep on trying to bring perl into every conversation, make sure there is some mostly irrelevant perl story on the front page, etc. I wouldn't expect Hacker News to care much about the language, but rather what's being done. If you built a 10 story house would you be sure to mention what brand of hammer you used? I wouldn't, who cares. It's the act and the result that matters.
- rjbond3rd 16y agoAbsolutely you are right that it's results that matter. I use a lot of programming languages, and I never feel the need to love or hate on any of them. But regarding people who "bring Perl into every conversation," it seems to me it is the naysayers who are doing that. Disliking something is fine, but -mentioning- it all the time seems compulsive. And then the original commenter is talking about "back in the day," so I guess this is a kind of reverse nostalgia (things were worse back then)?
- loewenskind 16y ago>it seems to me it is the naysayers who are doing that. At most, the "naysayers" can't be any more than the perl advocates. No one is going out of their way to post articles against perl. We just come out when someone posts yet another perl advocation piece. >Disliking something is fine, but -mentioning- it all the time seems compulsive. Liking something is fine, but -mentioning- it all the time seems compulsive. >And then the original commenter is talking about "back in the day," For all intents and purposes, perl's time has come and gone. Right or wrong, just or unjust. That's just how it is. No amount of wishing or screaming "look at this, we can also do Rails-type stuff!" will change that. Of course when someone posts yet another perl plea for relevancy, people who used it back when it was the language wax sentimental. You'd get something similar if you posted about some new project with OS2 or BEOS or something (arguably better technologies in their day then the one that ended up winning).
- kgtm 16y agoThe problem with Perl is that those that "aren't into Perl anymore." are louder than those who are.
- loewenskind 16y agoPlease don't say that. The people who are into it are too loud as it is. If someone popped up every now and then and said "Yea, it was a great ride into work this morning with my horse & buggy." Of course most people's response is going to be "hrm, yea I've rode in one of those before but it doesn't make much practical sense now". NOTE: I'm not saying that perl is literally as obsolete as a horse & buggy but rather for most programmers to day it may as well be.
- rjbond3rd 16y ago> it doesn't make much practical sense now It helps to read the artice? Anyway, it's my goal to avoid "most programmers."
- loewenskind 16y agoAgain, my comment isn't about the article.
- rjbond3rd 16y agoFYI, the article is shorter than all your comments. cough
- loewenskind 16y agoWhich further illustrates my point. What is the point of posting 4 or 5 paragraphs from someone clueless about the subject they're talking about?
- rjbond3rd 16y ago
- berntb 16y ago>>I am puzzled by all these old-timers who feel the need to say they "aren't into Perl anymore." That's fine. I'm not into Windows anymore, but I don't go around telling everyone :) Some of them are language war trolls. The rest... well, read some _old_ Perl code from 1999 or so (Nagios, maybe?). :-) Modern Perl with the Perl 6 backports like Moose and other CPAN stuff is totally another thing. I don't really know if it works better for most people to treat your computer language like something extensible, that can grow -- but still force people to learn old cruft, to handle that? I know one thing: I love it, because it is fun. And I need that -- I hated my life when I worked for money in Java. Edit: Grammar.
- loewenskind 16y agoTL;DR: I sometimes need to do some scripting and I use perl because I know it. So what? Flagged. This is blatant fanboy nonsense. Nothing remotely of interest here.
- windsurfer 16y agoI guess this is supposed to be a discussion-starter. The author talks about some things that are slightly controversial.
- loewenskind 16y agoI didn't see anything very controversial for Hacker News. Perhaps for perlmonks.
- prog 16y agoI have to agree. I don't really mind seeing articles like this on HN sometimes and I confess I submit some articles like this at times. The discussion here is what I am really interested in.
- tintin 16y ago"Nothing remotely of interest here." Why not? It got me thinking. I often return to PHP, even for things like computer graphics. Everybody knows PHP is slow as hell with computer graphics. So why do I use PHP for it? My answer would be: quick results. No need to setup a project, framework or whatever. Just create an empty file and you are ready to prototype, create a dirty hack, create a quick fix, have a proof of concept.
- loewenskind 16y agoDid you actually look at the article? It's just some random guy doing some scripting. He's not using any modern perl stuff so it's not interesting for perl fans. It's certainly not interesting for the rest of us who don't care about perl. What's the point?
- thomas11 16y ago
- zdw 16y agoDid it last week. Been tooling around with Ruby (MacRuby actually), and had a data processing task that required round tripping to Excel - CPAN to the rescue. Because of it's age, there's just a greater number of codebases out there that can do esoteric and unusual stuff - I tend to think that languages that share easy interop through a shared runtime (Cocoa/Macruby, Java/Scala/JRuby, etc.) might be the future of that concept.
- getsat 16y agoWhy didn't you install a gem for spreadsheet manipulation?
- zdw 16y agoEveryone involved is on a Mac, and the ruby code to control Excel is OLE based, thus Windows only. Also, the files are .xls, which doesn't have a writer method in ruby (that I'm aware of), although there is an .xlsx library. Perl's ParseExcel and WriteExcel worked great in this case, and easily handle edge cases like leading zeros on zipcodes, formatting directives, etc. As always YMMV.
- andrewcarpenter 16y agoI've used the Ruby spreadsheet gem with success. It's a bit old, but works ok. http://spreadsheet.rubyforge.org/ http://spreadsheet.rubyforge.org/
- getsat 16y agoI've used this extensively for generating spreadsheets, and it's pretty awesome.
- zdw 16y agoAh, a port of Perl's module... good to know. Makes you wonder how soon it'll be before languages that are out of favor but have great libraries written for them are mainly viewed as targets for mining ideas and techniques, like how the various open source kernel developers use each other's kernels as driver documentation.
- jonathansizz 16y agoThis article is actually quite revealing. The modern Perl movement clearly passed this guy by; this is clear from several statements in the article, beginning with his second sentence. Perl is just seen as it was ten years ago. So the challenge for those of us who like Perl and would like to see better coding practices in the language is to spread the modern Perl word beyond the confines of the Perl echo chamber. This clearly isn't happening yet: instead Perl is seen as an ancient language only good for knocking up a quick script in an emergency. Oh, and loewenskind: if you had read the article, you'd see it's far from 'blatant fanboy nonsense'. At best it is a mean and backhanded compliment.
- loewenskind 16y agoI didn't mean what he said was, I meant posting it here was. It's 5 paragraphs about some guy scripting. Who cares? Are we going to start posting Yahoo answers about perl next? How about IRC logs?
- jonathansizz 16y agoI agree with you on that point.
- Kaizyn 16y agoYou know, the Perl community could just release Perl 6 finally so they had the "shiny new language" to point to whenever someone talks about the old days of Perl.
- chromatic 16y agoHow many releases of Perl 6 do you want to see?
- donaldc 16y agoI can't speak for the grandparent of this comment, but I'd like to see a Perl 6 release that is actually competitive with perl5 and python in a production setting. Last I heard, the Perl 6 implementations were still very slow, and lacking significant functionality specified in the Synopses. Until such a release happens, Perl 6 is a nice idea, but not actually useful to me.
- stcredzero 16y agoWould it be allowed to "package" a library implemented in Perl as a component in an iPhone app? Lua is allowed for implementing "a part" of the functionality in many apps. What if the Perl libraries were packaged as source-less runtimes with the ability to compile of eval?
- matthavener 16y agoI wonder if he's returning to perl because its inherently a better language for parsing, or if he's just incredibly comfortable with the succinct regex and string parsing syntax in perl? I've found myself going back to perl, but usually because I know how to do it in perl and I'm too time-pressed to learn how to do it in python, shell scripting, or something else
- prog 16y agoPerl can definitely be more compact than Python for regex and parsing but I am surprised that he need to move from Ruby to Perl. Ruby borrows much of the regex and quote syntax from Perl.
- skarayan 16y agoI was a passionate PERL developer for many years. Then, one day, I met Ruby. I don't think I will ever go back, mostly because I love how Ruby does objects and it has a nicer syntax.
- prog 16y agoI tried Perl and moved to Python. With Ruby, I really like what I see. Unfortunately, I have spent quite a bit of time with Python and know it too well to want to move.
- sjs 16y agoPython and Ruby are more similar than they are different. They're like 2 chocolate bars hanging out in the store, sure one has peanuts and the other has caramel but at the end of the day they're both chocolate bars. If you're happy with Python stick with it. They're both good languages.
- glenjamin 16y agoI cannot agree with this more! I'm constantly suprised by the amount of Ruby vs Python arguments I see. There's only about 3 or 4 actual differences between the two. (I started to list them, then realised I'd have to do more research to explain properly - and left it for now.)
- rjbond3rd 16y agoJudging from your caps, I'm guessing that was back in 1987? It's been "Perl" since 1991 :)
- btilly 16y agoActually it has been Perl since 1987. The Practical Extraction and Report Language/Pathologically Eclectic Rubbish Lister joke has been part of the language from the start.
- mikecaron 16y agoI certainly feel the same pull. My time on Hacker News has led me to pursue Python vigorously and I have found that there are certain things that Perl is just less verbose with. The thing that I don't like about it is that is so easy for n00bs to screw up and it's very easy to write poor Perl code. CPAN/easy_install... it's two jelly bellys in the same bag to me.
- gte910h 16y agoI'm not trying to start a war here. Python and Ruby both have their place. Just saying, this is a ruby users problem, generally speaking, not a python user's problem. I actually find that this is one of the weaknesses of ruby (vs python): People who prefer it also know perl and can stand working with perl. The python people can't stand perl largely, and make a billion python modules. So, we have lots of python modules duplicating perl modules cause after python, people were unwilling to return to perl.
- wycats 16y agoI am not aware of a significant number of Ruby developers who jump back to Perl instead of writing Ruby libraries. I'm not sure where you got that impression from.
- gte910h 16y agoRuby developers I've worked with who've done exactly what the guy in the article did? "Yo Sam, what's the .pl file. Is that from a tool? Naw, the perl library is really nice...I'd have had to write the parser if I did it in Ruby" Most of the Ruby developers I know are in their 30's and all but 2 know perl. That may be the difference.