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Perl is really one of the best languages and in modern times is underrated. I've been using it in production for most of my critical services since about 2012.
by jb1991 4y ago
Perl is really one of the best languages and in modern times is underrated. I've been using it in production for most of my critical services since about 2012. I've used many other languages since then but always keep coming back to perl. It's a true gem of a language.
- G3rn0ti 4y agoIt's grand child, Raku, also seems to be an impressive language actually. Hated by Perlers and non-Perlers alike, it actually would be a great environment to build powerful programs in: https://www.oreilly.com/library/view/learning-perl-6/9781491977675/ https://www.oreilly.com/library/view/learning-perl-6/9781491...
- lizmat 4y agohttps://raku.org https://raku.org
- kamaal 4y ago>>Hated by Perlers and non-Perlers alike Wrong. Perlers still cheer for it. But for some reasons it hasn't wide spread adoption yet. We hope to use it some day in production.
- counterpartyrsk 4y ago
- G3rn0ti 4y agoThat's what I meant when I said Perlers hate Rakuans. It's an intersting example of "The People's Front of Judea" vs. "The Judean People's Front". I hope you gain inner peace one day again.
- newaccount2021 4y ago
- spijdar 4y agoThis is a pretty remarkably bitter and uncharitable take, given that Raku is the original intended successor of Perl, created by Perl's author, and sharing a lot of the "spirit" of Perl. That ship sailed, I won't argue it, and I'm not personally invested in either "camp", but in a thread saying "Hey, Perl is actually a pretty cool language!", I think a short mention of Raku isn't worth this reaction.
- 0x445442 4y agoYeah I wish Raku would pick up some steam. It’s the only newish language I’ve looked at that’s made me say wow and it cleans up some of the thorny Perl5 sigil issues.
- yamtaddle 4y agoI always liked the sigils :-) When I was first learning to program and picked up Perl 5 (I was interested in Web programming, so... that was the thing to learn at the time) and then later read some books (yes, kids, we used to read books) on Java and C++, I wondered how the hell anyone could make sense of them. And hacking up early Javascript snippets (you know, for image rollovers, the only thing anyone used it for for the first few years) was so painful. It's just words! There's nothing to indicate what anything is! The examples in the books were so hard to read. The answer, of course, was "they use syntax highlighting", but I'd not made that discovery yet.
- 0x445442 4y agoOh Sigils aren’t bad. It’s just they’re more consistent in Raku, particularly with regard to arrays and hashes.
- justinator 4y agoI don't think anyone hates it, but there were many people who were looking for a solid release that ran fast-enough. There was also... drama, which I feel no one cares for.
- weare138 4y agoI messed around with Raku and it is seriously underrated. If anyone hasn't yet I would recommend giving it a try. It still does all the cool stuff Perl 5 can do but with the features you would expect from a modern language baked in. Raku and the core modules are solid and can be used in production but unfortunately the overall ecosystem is still struggling. 3rd party modules can be hit or miss. I found several of them weren't well maintained or seemed abandoned.
- zaidhaan 4y agoWhat do you typically use perl for? I thought it was most commonly used for scripting and running cgi scripts. I find bash to be much more readable and tend to use it or python for most of my scripts
- G3rn0ti 4y ago> I find bash to be much more readable Lol, you find bash readable? With all its weird ad-hoc constructs? I don’t pretend Perl looks pretty but at least its constructs seem to be consciously designed and do not look bolted on. At my work place we still maintain a huge web application written in Perl 5. Most of the time if we are in trouble it‘s due to bad architectural designs that are not specific to Perl as a language or ecosystem. Only rarely I stumble over issues like implicit returns, or context sensitive sub routines. Also I hate Perl 5 allowing circular includes. The worst offenders among in-house modules are Perl modules written in a Java-esque style which mostly would have benefitted well from using native Perl features instead of trying to mimick Java programs.
- gl-prod 4y agoWhat does Perl do in the web app?
- G3rn0ti 4y agoEverything basically: Generating HTML, serving AJAX requests, communicating with other services, processing files, running DB queries etc etc. It even has a (questionable) feature embedding LuaScript using Lua::Inline and, hence, allows our clients to write little Lua scripts against our Perl API. Our application continuously runs over 20 years already and its user base kept growing ever since. When I arrived I tried to move as much of the front end logic to JS but the backend remained in Perl as most business logic still lives there (and not in the DB). These days we try to implement new features in separate JS or TypeScript services and SPAs that, however, communicate with our REST API that is implemented in Perl/Mojolicious. This way we can hire cheaper JS devs (that never learned Perl) and people can still enjoy React and modern frameworks if they so wish. The most talented ones I try to sucker into little refactoring projects in Perl. Most JS developers that tried got fluent in Perl 5 only after a couple of weeks. In the future we will try to move more business logic of the "Kernel" into the DB system since Postgres grew much more powerful compared to the time back when the application was invented. I believe this will be our only hope to actually shrink our Perl 5 code base eventually.
- no_wizard 4y agoI admit the only time I reach for Perl is when I need a really strong and dependable regex service. Still one of the best ways to parse text to this day. Perl text parsing capabilities are nearly unrivaled still.