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There is nothing in the (IT) world I fear more then... Perl projects. The shear madness it will leash upon you when the dependencies fail is maddening. Never wi

There is nothing in the (IT) world I fear more then... Perl projects. The shear madness it will leash upon you when the dependencies fail is maddening. Never will I voluntarily touch anything written in Perl ever again in my live. I've seen the power of Perl, the beauty and elegance of it, but everything was ruined by the absolute shit show when it comes to its packet managers. /rant.

johnisgood 6y ago
I hate everything there is to hate about CPAN. I also hate how Perl libraries are handled. I have to have like 5 lines of code related to it in ~/.bashrc or ~/.bash_profile. Bleh. Perl libraries are always a problem when I want my program to run on other machines. No thank you.
- esaym 6y ago
  I find this to be a weird statement. I've never really fought with "cpan" but have had huge fights with node and python packages. The old school "cpan" command has not been recommended to be used for nearly a decade now. Maybe that is your issue? Everyone just uses cpan-minus: http://cpanmin.us/ http://cpanmin.us/ or "cpanm". It will install anything, if you have write access to the installed perl location, it will install globally, otherwise it installs packages into "~/perl5" then just do something like "export PERL5LIB=~/perl5/lib/perl5/" in your bashrc. Or maybe you are talking about having to compile code in certain packages? Alot of stuff using ssl has C code which links against openssl which is always a pain. Not sure what other issues you might be alluding to... There are some "packaging" tools to try to bundle and pin libraries, kind of like venv for python. I've never messed with them though. We just compile the latest perl binary and install all our needed cpan modules globally. Never worry about pinning since nothing is ever updated on cpan anymore...
  - johnisgood 6y ago
    > The old school "cpan" command has not been recommended to be used for nearly a decade now. Maybe that is your issue? I did not know that it was not supposed to be used, so that might explain my issues, but at the same time it did work for me on my machine, but had a hard time running my Perl script on a VPS, because I had to set everything up again and for some reason I ran into some errors. I often ran into packages that failed to compile, too, yeah. > Never worry about pinning since nothing is ever updated on cpan anymore... Nothing makes it kind of sad. :/
threeqhan 6y ago
Sheer as in "unmitigated" and shear as in sheep But I agree with this, except for python
esaym 6y ago
I think the OP is mostly talking about "perl one liners" on the shell like this: https://catonmat.net/ftp/perl1line.txt https://catonmat.net/ftp/perl1line.txt It is not that hard either (unless perl is completely foreign to you). Ironically just today I wrote a python script (using concurrent.futures) to batch re-encode 10gb of mp3 podcasts into 3gb of opus files to save space. Before I deleted the old mp3's, I did a quick file count of mp3 and opus files only to have 5 extra opus files... I beat my head really good trying to glue a bunch of bash stuff together but I could not find where the 5 extra opus files were coming from. I defected back to perl. All I needed was an alphabetical list of all the files (there were many sub-directories), perfect for a little perl oneliner: find /podcasts/ -iname "* \.ogg" | perl -nle 'if( $_ =~ /\/([\w-]+.\w\w\w)$/) { print "$1"}' | sort >ogg.txt I did the same thing for * .mp3 files and then diffed the two files. I quickly noticed the extra 5 opus files were from me doing test encodes a couple of weeks ago that I forgot about. Sure it looks hideous, but the explanation is easy: for 'perl -nle', the 'l' means process each line from stdin individually, the 'n' means no auto printing of the line, and the 'e' is basically the perl 'one liner' mode. Either way, each line comes in and is stored in '$_', I use a capturing regex to grab the file name without parent directory names, basically everything after the last '/' in a path that ends with a three letter extension (\w\w\w). The "captured" part of the regex ends up in '$1'. Also see 'perldoc run' for all the runtime one liner options.
- high_priest 6y ago
  Why am I not surprised that the PERL part could be solved with bash in the same space. Why are you so eager to use lang on top of lang, in such simple cases?
  - esaym 6y ago
    Feel free to demonstrate. Take a long path with nasty characters and give me the ending file name. I want "track1.mp3" returned from: /podcast/with/nasty'--c h a r$/and/stuff/track1.mp3
    - AareyBaba 6y ago
tingletech 6y ago
I have 20 year old Perl code I run in production. I had to re-install it our move to Amazon Linux 2. My 10 year old install process for the cpanm setup still worked. My 10 year old Python had to be moved to python 3; but the 20 year old Perl still runs
- edgyquant 6y ago
  I’m a big time python fan (80% of the code I write is python) but growing up I loved Perl (after starting out as a PHP dev) as a scripting language and I hate how much flak people give it. Though I do understand since there’s a million ways to do everything in Perl if you aren’t familiar with the language it can look daunting. But I’d argue the same can be said about JavaScript and I still love that language as well.
bmn__ 6y ago
I notice you did not provide any details, depriving us of the ability to determine whether the shit show is PEBCAK or genuine.

johnisgood 6y ago

I hate everything there is to hate about CPAN. I also hate how Perl libraries are handled. I have to have like 5 lines of code related to it in ~/.bashrc or ~/.bash_profile. Bleh. Perl libraries are always a problem when I want my program to run on other machines. No thank you.

esaym 6y ago
I find this to be a weird statement. I've never really fought with "cpan" but have had huge fights with node and python packages. The old school "cpan" command has not been recommended to be used for nearly a decade now. Maybe that is your issue? Everyone just uses cpan-minus: http://cpanmin.us/ http://cpanmin.us/ or "cpanm". It will install anything, if you have write access to the installed perl location, it will install globally, otherwise it installs packages into "~/perl5" then just do something like "export PERL5LIB=~/perl5/lib/perl5/" in your bashrc. Or maybe you are talking about having to compile code in certain packages? Alot of stuff using ssl has C code which links against openssl which is always a pain. Not sure what other issues you might be alluding to... There are some "packaging" tools to try to bundle and pin libraries, kind of like venv for python. I've never messed with them though. We just compile the latest perl binary and install all our needed cpan modules globally. Never worry about pinning since nothing is ever updated on cpan anymore...
- johnisgood 6y ago
  > The old school "cpan" command has not been recommended to be used for nearly a decade now. Maybe that is your issue? I did not know that it was not supposed to be used, so that might explain my issues, but at the same time it did work for me on my machine, but had a hard time running my Perl script on a VPS, because I had to set everything up again and for some reason I ran into some errors. I often ran into packages that failed to compile, too, yeah. > Never worry about pinning since nothing is ever updated on cpan anymore... Nothing makes it kind of sad. :/

threeqhan 6y ago

Sheer as in "unmitigated" and shear as in sheep But I agree with this, except for python

esaym 6y ago

I think the OP is mostly talking about "perl one liners" on the shell like this: https://catonmat.net/ftp/perl1line.txt https://catonmat.net/ftp/perl1line.txt It is not that hard either (unless perl is completely foreign to you). Ironically just today I wrote a python script (using concurrent.futures) to batch re-encode 10gb of mp3 podcasts into 3gb of opus files to save space. Before I deleted the old mp3's, I did a quick file count of mp3 and opus files only to have 5 extra opus files... I beat my head really good trying to glue a bunch of bash stuff together but I could not find where the 5 extra opus files were coming from. I defected back to perl. All I needed was an alphabetical list of all the files (there were many sub-directories), perfect for a little perl oneliner: find /podcasts/ -iname "* \.ogg" | perl -nle 'if( $_ =~ /\/([\w-]+.\w\w\w)$/) { print "$1"}' | sort >ogg.txt I did the same thing for * .mp3 files and then diffed the two files. I quickly noticed the extra 5 opus files were from me doing test encodes a couple of weeks ago that I forgot about. Sure it looks hideous, but the explanation is easy: for 'perl -nle', the 'l' means process each line from stdin individually, the 'n' means no auto printing of the line, and the 'e' is basically the perl 'one liner' mode. Either way, each line comes in and is stored in '$_', I use a capturing regex to grab the file name without parent directory names, basically everything after the last '/' in a path that ends with a three letter extension (\w\w\w). The "captured" part of the regex ends up in '$1'. Also see 'perldoc run' for all the runtime one liner options.

high_priest 6y ago
Why am I not surprised that the PERL part could be solved with bash in the same space. Why are you so eager to use lang on top of lang, in such simple cases?
- esaym 6y ago
  Feel free to demonstrate. Take a long path with nasty characters and give me the ending file name. I want "track1.mp3" returned from: /podcast/with/nasty'--c h a r$/and/stuff/track1.mp3
  - AareyBaba 6y ago

tingletech 6y ago

I have 20 year old Perl code I run in production. I had to re-install it our move to Amazon Linux 2. My 10 year old install process for the cpanm setup still worked. My 10 year old Python had to be moved to python 3; but the 20 year old Perl still runs

edgyquant 6y ago
I’m a big time python fan (80% of the code I write is python) but growing up I loved Perl (after starting out as a PHP dev) as a scripting language and I hate how much flak people give it. Though I do understand since there’s a million ways to do everything in Perl if you aren’t familiar with the language it can look daunting. But I’d argue the same can be said about JavaScript and I still love that language as well.

bmn__ 6y ago

I notice you did not provide any details, depriving us of the ability to determine whether the shit show is PEBCAK or genuine.