6 ms·
Who writes new stuff in Pearl?
by sebyx07 6y ago
Who writes new stuff in Pearl?
- eCa 6y agoIt’s my preferred language for personal stuff. (I have no idea what’s behind it, but I’m sorry to see Sawyer X leave. And there certainly is cruft in Perl.)
- jlouis 6y agoPerl is a nice tool for quickly mangling textual data. I ended up using sed/awk and Python instead for much of what used Perl for back in the day. Today, data is often semi-structured and jq has become part of the toolbox as well.
- ddtaylor 6y agoWait, you mean like https://crystal-lang.org/ https://crystal-lang.org/
- redis_mlc 6y agoPerl experts prefer it over Python, because: 1) forward symbol references 2) moderate type checking (at both compile and run times) 3) Mojolicious.
- LanceH 6y agoPeople overestimate the contribution of all the fancy data science libraries and schemes compared to the effort of getting clean data into place where it can be picked apart. Whether it is worth learning both Perl and Python for the same project is questionable, but as for assembling and cleaning up data, I haven't come across anything as good.
- wheresmycraisin 6y ago1) What is forward symbol referencing? 2) ... what type checking? You mean scalars vs arrays? 3) Mojolicious is certainly a full-fledged web framework, but there are so many just-as-good frameworks out there for other similar languages (Python/Ruby/PHP).
- grumple 6y agoFastmail, apparently.
- lilSebastian 6y agoI do, for national infrastructure critical systems and services. Edit: it's perl, not pearl, maybe you got auto-corrected
- dhosek 6y agoMaybe he meant https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PEARL_(programming_language) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PEARL_(programming_language)
- lilSebastian 6y agoThat'd be off topic for the tread, a mistake seems more likely.
- JoelJacobson 6y agoOne example is PostgreSQL, it depends on Perl and writes new stuff in it. For instance, this commit https://github.com/postgres/postgres/commit/c64d0cd5ce24a344798534f1bc5827a9199b7a6e https://github.com/postgres/postgres/commit/c64d0cd5ce24a344... that implemented a minimal perfect hash solution to speed up the parser. The actual Perl code: https://github.com/postgres/postgres/blob/master/src/tools/PerfectHash.pm https://github.com/postgres/postgres/blob/master/src/tools/P...
- anarazel 6y agoBut only because perl was chosen as the default non-C language for postgres build system stuff maybe 20 years ago...
- JoelJacobson 6y agoYes, I agree. I just thought it was a nice example on some high-quality recently written Perl code, implementing something entirely new.
- acomjean 6y agoOur bioinformatics core did for our backend tools. Well our intern/co-worker who left a year ago did. Oddly she didn’t like Perl at first, but took a class ended up Teaching assisting then teaching it. Loved Perl. I’m ok with it. As a text parsing/manipulating language it’s very good. Everyone has different tastes in Languages. I’m ok with that.
- cashewchoo 6y agoLegacy uses and a smattering of personal preference. Perl was hugely productive in its day, when alternatives were either non-existent or extremely nascent (Python and Ruby) or things like C, C++, Java, or Bash. You can probably imagine how writing Perl was fun for script-y tasks when compared to doing it in those languages. So, it has a large legacy presence and isn't going anywhere. Plus there's a few people for whom it is muscle memory, and IME muscle memory can easily beat out language niceness/appropriateness for productivity in personal things. Disclaimer: I was born in the early 90's so I was learning long division during Perl's glory days. My perspective is mostly from working in a large Perl codebase that was born in those years and talking with the people who chose Perl for said codebase.