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Have you asked for help? I would really appreciate an honest answer. I'm putting out this question because your post reads like you never did, and I can totally
by bmn__ 6y ago
Have you asked for help? I would really appreciate an honest answer. I'm putting out this question because your post reads like you never did, and I can totally see having a bad time when someone voluntarily shuts himself out of the community and thus never gets to see frustrations addressed. I don't want my fellow hackers to suffer bad feelings when it's completely and easily avoidable.
• Support for database drivers exists, most notably the DBI mailing list where all the driver authors participate. This is mentioned prominently in the documentation.
• Perl predates Google, so it is tragically wrong to put the blame on Perl. Blame Google for not searching correctly for a long time. This is fixed since 2019. Other search engines did not make mistakes of the same kind.
I personally do not see Google as the first and final means. It's not asking too much using other means of looking up information when Google falls short, e.g. the offline documentation shipping with language, or bookmarking some specialised Web sites and using their search.
• Explicit references are a consequence of Perl's early life (< v5) catering to programmers familiar with shell, and then adding the feature in a backward-compatible manner. When it came to adding the feature, it was the choice between explicit references with the benefit of keeping code running, or implicit references and invalidating existing code with the benefit of terser syntax (i.e. the dereferencing arrow -> would mostly disappear). The trade-off was made in favour of backward-compatibility, and this direction was the case ever since. Hope this explains it well enough, keep in mind that you have the advantage of judging the decision in hindsight.
• Debuggers not existing is just plain wrong.
- xupybd 6y agoNo I didn't go to the mailing lists. I did seek help on Stack Overflow. I also asked the Perl expert at work. He tended to get mad and say things like "that's basic CGI, you should know that". I agree Perl's docs are great. Once I discovered 'man perl op' I was set. My complaint is that Perl differs from other languages where a quick Google of a bit of syntax leads directly to stack overflow question or the language docs. The DBI issue I had was a mix of FreeTDS, Sybase and SQL Server 2008. The combination of an old version of SQL Server and these drivers meant we hit uncommon bugs. My complaint here is how tricky it was to debug. The string has an internal flag to say that it's UTF8. Somehow that was getting set when the encoding was Windows CP1252. It took me a long time to learn about how Perl stored these Strings. Even longer to resolve the issue it caused. Something about packing and unpacking a string just felt harder than it needed to be. The experience left a me disliking Perl. I worked with a Perl backend for almost a decade. I love not working with it now. I don't blame Perl for it's difficult to Google syntax, or it's design choices for backwards compatibility. I know some people are Perl grandmasters and can do amazing things with it in short time ( I worked with one ). But to me I didn't like it, it felt out dated and harder to use than any other scripting language that I've used. Debuggers may well exist. My initial attempts at getting one running failed, but that was years ago. If there are good debuggers out there I'm happy to admit I'm wrong on that front.