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Off topic, but the best programmers that I've met so far in my career were Perl gurus. They had this super power where they could implement new tools from scrat
by haolez 6y ago
Off topic, but the best programmers that I've met so far in my career were Perl gurus. They had this super power where they could implement new tools from scratch and they would feel robust as if they were made by an external vendor or an open source project. It was magic to me.
- cookiecaper 6y agoYeah, I started working at a place where 90%+ of the production codebase is actively-maintained Perl, and it honestly feels great. These guys might have a hard time fitting a recruiter's definition for a "rock star" but they're the best set of colleagues I've had in a very long time, and that's after working at multiple flashy tech companies. Long live Perl. We can only hope to get another generation of programmers as committed and useful as the people who still write Perl every day.
- haolez 6y agoBtw, my gurus are working at Comcast. I was kind of surprised to see Perl demand in a company as big as Comcast nowadays.
- aduitsis 6y agoI started using Perl in 2000 to rescue my diploma thesis (which was Java and C). I was working on a piece of software that was to communicate with another system that was the subject of another sister-thesis. The person working on the sister-thesis decided to abandon it. And I could really not demonstrate my work as it couldn't work standalone. In the place of the missing sister-system, I quickly put together something in Perl and was able to salvage the work and deliver my thesis. Compared to Java and C of the day, it felt like magic. To this day, I have never seen anything that can even remotely approach the ability of Perl to prototype something out of thin air. Usually there is a gap between script-like tools (like sh, sed, awk, grep, jq, curl, etc) with which you can quickly put together stuff and a "real" language which usually needs scaffolding and preparation. Perl can do both, you can write excellent one-liners and you can also write complex software with libraries and frameworks and dependencies and tests.