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Absolutely but that's a serious problem with any language that does automatic dependency handling this way. I would argue that the problem you see isn't so muc

by swiley 5y ago

Absolutely but that's a serious problem with any language that does automatic dependency handling this way. I would argue that the problem you see isn't so much with perl (although it's definitely less popular) but with the exponential dependency explosion with little verification that results from these sorts of systems.

dale_glass 5y ago
It's a problem regardless of dependency handling though. At some point, something in the S3 API is going to change. Crypto modules are going to add some algorithms and deprecate others. Some big system library is going to release version 2.0. Ubuntu is going to stop the last LTS release where everything worked. At my workplace we used to make very heavy use of Perl, and now that's gradually going away, because there's a fair amount of pretty big stuff that's either unmaintained, or at the very least concerning. The Wx module for instance has always been a bit of a pain in my experience and I don't know how much life it's got left. But I'm certainly not going to volunteer to maintain it if it ever breaks.
zenron 5y ago
In today's topography, these dependencies drive the use case more times than not. Something like 'As a clerical manager I want IT to take an old nightly file (proprietary fmt) and transform it to CSV and put it onto our S3 drive so that we can get the data into our EDW staging area.' If Perl can only get the transformation piece where another language gets you to the last part then there is less reason to use Perl at all. That was Perl's bread and butter. It was the king of data transformation. It was even used (is used) to prototype data conversion from COBOL to xml. I've even seen it parsing COBOL code for keyword highlighting and hosting a website to view the results. I could easily write that in SCALA today in a one stop shop, arguably faster. Perl isn't dead but its not exactly alive. And let's face it, it isn't really being taught in schools anymore. It and PHP were when I was in college. Can any language fall to this fate? Sure, but if you stick with Java/Scala/Kotlin, Javascript/Typescript/Node and .Net/C#/F# you are pretty safe for a decade or two. Perl is just the weeds in the garden at this point.

by swiley 5y ago

dale_glass 5y ago

It's a problem regardless of dependency handling though. At some point, something in the S3 API is going to change. Crypto modules are going to add some algorithms and deprecate others. Some big system library is going to release version 2.0. Ubuntu is going to stop the last LTS release where everything worked. At my workplace we used to make very heavy use of Perl, and now that's gradually going away, because there's a fair amount of pretty big stuff that's either unmaintained, or at the very least concerning. The Wx module for instance has always been a bit of a pain in my experience and I don't know how much life it's got left. But I'm certainly not going to volunteer to maintain it if it ever breaks.

zenron 5y ago

In today's topography, these dependencies drive the use case more times than not. Something like 'As a clerical manager I want IT to take an old nightly file (proprietary fmt) and transform it to CSV and put it onto our S3 drive so that we can get the data into our EDW staging area.' If Perl can only get the transformation piece where another language gets you to the last part then there is less reason to use Perl at all. That was Perl's bread and butter. It was the king of data transformation. It was even used (is used) to prototype data conversion from COBOL to xml. I've even seen it parsing COBOL code for keyword highlighting and hosting a website to view the results. I could easily write that in SCALA today in a one stop shop, arguably faster. Perl isn't dead but its not exactly alive. And let's face it, it isn't really being taught in schools anymore. It and PHP were when I was in college. Can any language fall to this fate? Sure, but if you stick with Java/Scala/Kotlin, Javascript/Typescript/Node and .Net/C#/F# you are pretty safe for a decade or two. Perl is just the weeds in the garden at this point.