6 ms·

I find it pretty hilarious that he's picking Perl as a prototypical example of "today's" technology and the article is also blatantly advertising Perl books.

by gyulai 5y ago

piaste 5y ago
And Perl's first release was in... 1987.
- Ovid 5y ago
  Yes, late December, 1987, after the events I describe. It was released on Usenet, as I recall. I didn't even know what Usenet was back then. For me, it was pretty exciting to dial up a BBS, crash their software, and read through the code that the BBS was written in (and later contact the sysop to tell them how to replicate it). I doubt I could have even compiled the software onto a COCO 2 computer.
  - piaste 5y ago
    Sure, it's just funny that your example of "thirty years later" is code that someone could in principle have written in the same year (well, almost - I imagine Perl 1 might require some changes from the Perl 5 version). If I had to show how far we've got since then, and how different the experience could be for a novice programmer, I think I would display a .GIF where I press F12 in the browser, and write two lines of Javascript in the console, something like: var words = await fetch("some online JSON dictionary").json(); var lexed = "insert sentence".split(/punctuation regex/).map(w => words.indexOf(w)); I don't write JS habitually and I'm on my phone so it's probably got some mistakes, but you get the idea!
Ovid 5y ago
Well, duh :) Perl's still more popular than people think. I saw on the Board of Directors for the Perl foundation for years, regularly speak at conferences for it, have released tons of open-source software for it, and currently am working on the Corinna project to improve the core OOP for the language: https://github.com/Ovid/Cor https://github.com/Ovid/Cor Given that this site, like so many others, is to help me get work, I think it's natural I'd use Perl in my examples.
- ktpsns 5y ago
  Interesting – within the Corinna project, you aim to improve Perl5, isn't it? Is there some reason why you don't spend your time on Perl6?
  - Ovid 5y ago
    Oh, that is a long and complicated story. Perl 6 was announced a long time ago, but it took many years of development and planning and I (like others) used to joke that Duke Nukem Forever was going to be written in Perl 6. And then we got egg on our face when Duke Nukem Forever was released first. (And it turned out to be a turkey). However, many clients I spoke to at that time were telling me they wouldn't upgrade their Perl code because they were waiting for the new version ... which was seemingly never going to arrive. Worse, it became clear that Perl 6 was a new language, with common roots, but it wasn't like the Python 2/3 split: a wholesale rewrite of code would be necessary, or try to use a Perl 5 compatibility mode that may or may not have proven useful. So companies weren't upgrading, Perl developers were fighting, people were leaving the community and the Osborne Effect (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Osborne_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Osborne_effect) could be renamed the Perl 6 Effect (I'm aware that the Osborne Effect is more complicated than it's often portrayed). Worse, Perl 5 couldn't upgrade to Perl 6 because that version number was taken. Perl looked, to the outside world, like it wasn't upgrading any more. I even had one guy screaming at me at a Linux Conference about how Perl is shit, hadn't updated in 20 years, and ticked off a bunch of "facts" about Perl, most of which were objectively incorrect at the time, but Perl could no longer get its message out. There was discussion about leap-frogging the version number and going straight for Perl 7, but that caused even more fights, more people dropping out of the community, and we fractured. We tried saying "the name of the language is Perl 5 and we're upgrading every year—we're currently on version 34—but that didn't satisfy anyone, either. Eventually, Perl 6 was renamed to Raku (http://blogs.perl.org/users/ovid/2019/10/larry-has-approved-renaming-perl-6-to-raku.html http://blogs.perl.org/users/ovid/2019/10/larry-has-approved-...) and that freed us to upgrade our version number, but to what? Sawyer X, the former Perl Pumpking (development manager) proposed the Perl 7 project, but for many reasons, that also caused much anger. So today, we have Perl. There are ideas of moving to Perl 7, but much work needs to be done. My Corinna OOP project is likely part of that work and the Perl Steering Committee has met with me to say they'd like Corinna in core, but slowly, step-by-step, to ensure that we don't push too much into the core and make mistakes we can't easily back out of. I have more ideas about what is needed to get to Perl 7, but they'll largely wait until after Corinna is in core and fleshed out. It's a lot of work and the team working on Corinna (making great suggestions and also helping me not make boneheaded errors), have put in a lot of effort to create something we can turn into a proper RFC. Paul Evan's Object::Pad (https://metacpan.org/pod/Object::Pad https://metacpan.org/pod/Object::Pad) is a testbed for many of these ideas. So, we're getting there, but slowly. However, it appears to be moving along more smoothly than other efforts in the past. The fact that the goal is more modest helps.
mrweasel 5y ago
I feel like Perl has shown up quit a bit in the last month. I kinda want to learn Perl now.
- HeckFeck 5y ago
  You'll enjoy it! Here's a well-written and resource to begin your journey: http://modernperlbooks.com/books/modern_perl_2016/ http://modernperlbooks.com/books/modern_perl_2016/ It explains many of Perl's "quirks" to a modern audience.
retrac 5y ago
Arguably, there is pre-Internet and post-Internet programming. Perl is a quintessential example for the Internet era of programming. It was developed via USENET and email and FTP, with a global base of open source coders to drawn on. Got a question? Ask the mailing list. CPAN, Perl's automatic module system, dates to the early 90s. This is very different from programming alone on a micro, or on a mini or mainframe in an office environment. Much more like how we still do it today.
forinti 5y ago
Python is from February 1991, and Perl 5 is just a bit older having been launched in December 1987.

I find it pretty hilarious that he's picking Perl as a prototypical example of "today's" technology and the article is also blatantly advertising Perl books.

by gyulai 5y ago

I find it pretty hilarious that he's picking Perl as a prototypical example of "today's" technology and the article is also blatantly advertising Perl books.

piaste 5y ago

And Perl's first release was in... 1987.

Ovid 5y ago
Yes, late December, 1987, after the events I describe. It was released on Usenet, as I recall. I didn't even know what Usenet was back then. For me, it was pretty exciting to dial up a BBS, crash their software, and read through the code that the BBS was written in (and later contact the sysop to tell them how to replicate it). I doubt I could have even compiled the software onto a COCO 2 computer.
- piaste 5y ago
  Sure, it's just funny that your example of "thirty years later" is code that someone could in principle have written in the same year (well, almost - I imagine Perl 1 might require some changes from the Perl 5 version). If I had to show how far we've got since then, and how different the experience could be for a novice programmer, I think I would display a .GIF where I press F12 in the browser, and write two lines of Javascript in the console, something like: var words = await fetch("some online JSON dictionary").json(); var lexed = "insert sentence".split(/punctuation regex/).map(w => words.indexOf(w)); I don't write JS habitually and I'm on my phone so it's probably got some mistakes, but you get the idea!

Ovid 5y ago

Well, duh :) Perl's still more popular than people think. I saw on the Board of Directors for the Perl foundation for years, regularly speak at conferences for it, have released tons of open-source software for it, and currently am working on the Corinna project to improve the core OOP for the language: https://github.com/Ovid/Cor https://github.com/Ovid/Cor Given that this site, like so many others, is to help me get work, I think it's natural I'd use Perl in my examples.

ktpsns 5y ago
Interesting – within the Corinna project, you aim to improve Perl5, isn't it? Is there some reason why you don't spend your time on Perl6?
- Ovid 5y ago
  Oh, that is a long and complicated story. Perl 6 was announced a long time ago, but it took many years of development and planning and I (like others) used to joke that Duke Nukem Forever was going to be written in Perl 6. And then we got egg on our face when Duke Nukem Forever was released first. (And it turned out to be a turkey). However, many clients I spoke to at that time were telling me they wouldn't upgrade their Perl code because they were waiting for the new version ... which was seemingly never going to arrive. Worse, it became clear that Perl 6 was a new language, with common roots, but it wasn't like the Python 2/3 split: a wholesale rewrite of code would be necessary, or try to use a Perl 5 compatibility mode that may or may not have proven useful. So companies weren't upgrading, Perl developers were fighting, people were leaving the community and the Osborne Effect (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Osborne_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Osborne_effect) could be renamed the Perl 6 Effect (I'm aware that the Osborne Effect is more complicated than it's often portrayed). Worse, Perl 5 couldn't upgrade to Perl 6 because that version number was taken. Perl looked, to the outside world, like it wasn't upgrading any more. I even had one guy screaming at me at a Linux Conference about how Perl is shit, hadn't updated in 20 years, and ticked off a bunch of "facts" about Perl, most of which were objectively incorrect at the time, but Perl could no longer get its message out. There was discussion about leap-frogging the version number and going straight for Perl 7, but that caused even more fights, more people dropping out of the community, and we fractured. We tried saying "the name of the language is Perl 5 and we're upgrading every year—we're currently on version 34—but that didn't satisfy anyone, either. Eventually, Perl 6 was renamed to Raku (http://blogs.perl.org/users/ovid/2019/10/larry-has-approved-renaming-perl-6-to-raku.html http://blogs.perl.org/users/ovid/2019/10/larry-has-approved-...) and that freed us to upgrade our version number, but to what? Sawyer X, the former Perl Pumpking (development manager) proposed the Perl 7 project, but for many reasons, that also caused much anger. So today, we have Perl. There are ideas of moving to Perl 7, but much work needs to be done. My Corinna OOP project is likely part of that work and the Perl Steering Committee has met with me to say they'd like Corinna in core, but slowly, step-by-step, to ensure that we don't push too much into the core and make mistakes we can't easily back out of. I have more ideas about what is needed to get to Perl 7, but they'll largely wait until after Corinna is in core and fleshed out. It's a lot of work and the team working on Corinna (making great suggestions and also helping me not make boneheaded errors), have put in a lot of effort to create something we can turn into a proper RFC. Paul Evan's Object::Pad (https://metacpan.org/pod/Object::Pad https://metacpan.org/pod/Object::Pad) is a testbed for many of these ideas. So, we're getting there, but slowly. However, it appears to be moving along more smoothly than other efforts in the past. The fact that the goal is more modest helps.

mrweasel 5y ago

I feel like Perl has shown up quit a bit in the last month. I kinda want to learn Perl now.

HeckFeck 5y ago
You'll enjoy it! Here's a well-written and resource to begin your journey: http://modernperlbooks.com/books/modern_perl_2016/ http://modernperlbooks.com/books/modern_perl_2016/ It explains many of Perl's "quirks" to a modern audience.

retrac 5y ago

Arguably, there is pre-Internet and post-Internet programming. Perl is a quintessential example for the Internet era of programming. It was developed via USENET and email and FTP, with a global base of open source coders to drawn on. Got a question? Ask the mailing list. CPAN, Perl's automatic module system, dates to the early 90s. This is very different from programming alone on a micro, or on a mini or mainframe in an office environment. Much more like how we still do it today.

forinti 5y ago

Python is from February 1991, and Perl 5 is just a bit older having been launched in December 1987.