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I have hardly ever seen such high praise for a language. I guess I'll have to learn it sometime and see what the hoopla's about. With the Modern Perl book, of c

I have hardly ever seen such high praise for a language. I guess I'll have to learn it sometime and see what the hoopla's about. With the Modern Perl book, of course, if it's still the best-of-breed then.

bgilroy26 15y ago
If you enjoy Modern Perl, check out Higher Order Perl. It's a guide to functional programming in Perl and it's full of hipster-programmery goodness!
kamaal 15y ago
One way to measure the utility of a language is to see how its users perceive it. Both in the times of technology hype and otherwise. If I look at the Java world, I see most programmers come there because they need a job. I would program in Perl even if I would not be paid for it, just for the fun of it. Its like painting, or playing the piano, or drinking fine wine. I would like to do them, even there is no direct benefit from them. Some languages get a special distinction that its users just love to program in it. Languages and tools like Lisp, C, Perl, Vi, Emacs etc they just never go away. Because someone somewhere is always discovering some goodness in them and is using it. And that process is timeless. These languages have managed to last for decades sometimes their adoption drops, sometimes it peaks, sometimes there is a constant line of usage. But they don't go away. If you read the mailing lists during early days of Perl on comp.lang.perl.* and other writings by people like Tom Christiansen. You will see some unique tone of passion and excitement. The golf competitions, the discussions on one liners, the growth of CPAN, the occasional gems posted on Perl Monks. Great books like Programming Perl, Higher Order Perl and Modern Perl Book and Perl's extreme practical approach and emphasis of 'Getting things done'. I guess for people on Unix platforms who had no other respite but to use C and a mash of other Unix text processing utilities. Or for Java programmers who have to write 10 classes to open a file and do trivial operations. Perl is almost like giving Ice water to somebody in hell.
read_wharf 15y ago
Although Python is taking more of these roles over time, Perl is still the thing that holds much of the internet's infrastructure and tools together, as well as internal servers, so it's a good thing to know if you're interested in all that.
- kamaal 15y ago
  Hmmm, Python has some great frameworks and is a great language. But unfortunately, its almost like going backwards. Perl was invented because C + Unix text processing utilities together were not proving to be good for many tasks like Text processing, fast prototyping etc. Now using another C based language which doesn't do that, takes us back to the old problem again. IMO, Python doesn't solve those problems. Regex support is really bad in Python and file operations are not trivial. There is too much of Java feel to it and it just doesn't have the feel of bash/perl/awk's scripting powers. Scoping is just not right. There doesn't seem to be a sane ways of evolution without breaking backwards compatibility. No equivalent of CPAN. And in many ways white space based parsing is not good for large and nested code blocks. It still doesn't have multiline lambda's. And its too much do-it-one-true-way kind of language, that sort of is a blocker for quick hacking. Because I like to write what I think, and not the other way around. The language is too verbose, and unlike Perl and Emacs there are no exponential productivity gains over time. But I agree though, that Python does have some other good things. The OO syntax is neat, there are some great frameworks like Twisted and Django. And there is low barrier to entry which makes new bie feel just at home. The tutorials are just too good. And good standard libraries ship with it.
  - overgard 15y ago
    What you're saying seems handwavey and imprecise. What -- specifically -- is wrong with regular expressions and file operations in python? How is white space parsing "not good" for large and nested code blocks? (And why do you have large nested code blocks in the first place? Break those up! Those are hard to read regardless!) And how is there a "java feel"? What does that even mean? And in what way is python verbose? In my experience almost everything about it is almost as terse as possible, from the lack of needing curly braces to the minimalist syntax to naming things like "str" instead of "string"
danssig 15y ago
There is no hoopla outside of the echo chamber. If you want a truly amazing language I would suggest things like Haskell, Racket, Clojure, Erlang, Smalltalk, and/or Common Lisp. If you're looking for more batteries included then I'd suggest Python or perhaps Ruby. Things are always going on in those communities and they've made some great killer apps like Blender (python), Rails (Ruby), Django (Python) and countless more. These languages are just as flexible as Perl, though they have their strengths and weaknesses in different places than Perl does.

bgilroy26 15y ago

If you enjoy Modern Perl, check out Higher Order Perl. It's a guide to functional programming in Perl and it's full of hipster-programmery goodness!

kamaal 15y ago

One way to measure the utility of a language is to see how its users perceive it. Both in the times of technology hype and otherwise. If I look at the Java world, I see most programmers come there because they need a job. I would program in Perl even if I would not be paid for it, just for the fun of it. Its like painting, or playing the piano, or drinking fine wine. I would like to do them, even there is no direct benefit from them. Some languages get a special distinction that its users just love to program in it. Languages and tools like Lisp, C, Perl, Vi, Emacs etc they just never go away. Because someone somewhere is always discovering some goodness in them and is using it. And that process is timeless. These languages have managed to last for decades sometimes their adoption drops, sometimes it peaks, sometimes there is a constant line of usage. But they don't go away. If you read the mailing lists during early days of Perl on comp.lang.perl.* and other writings by people like Tom Christiansen. You will see some unique tone of passion and excitement. The golf competitions, the discussions on one liners, the growth of CPAN, the occasional gems posted on Perl Monks. Great books like Programming Perl, Higher Order Perl and Modern Perl Book and Perl's extreme practical approach and emphasis of 'Getting things done'. I guess for people on Unix platforms who had no other respite but to use C and a mash of other Unix text processing utilities. Or for Java programmers who have to write 10 classes to open a file and do trivial operations. Perl is almost like giving Ice water to somebody in hell.

read_wharf 15y ago

Although Python is taking more of these roles over time, Perl is still the thing that holds much of the internet's infrastructure and tools together, as well as internal servers, so it's a good thing to know if you're interested in all that.

kamaal 15y ago
Hmmm, Python has some great frameworks and is a great language. But unfortunately, its almost like going backwards. Perl was invented because C + Unix text processing utilities together were not proving to be good for many tasks like Text processing, fast prototyping etc. Now using another C based language which doesn't do that, takes us back to the old problem again. IMO, Python doesn't solve those problems. Regex support is really bad in Python and file operations are not trivial. There is too much of Java feel to it and it just doesn't have the feel of bash/perl/awk's scripting powers. Scoping is just not right. There doesn't seem to be a sane ways of evolution without breaking backwards compatibility. No equivalent of CPAN. And in many ways white space based parsing is not good for large and nested code blocks. It still doesn't have multiline lambda's. And its too much do-it-one-true-way kind of language, that sort of is a blocker for quick hacking. Because I like to write what I think, and not the other way around. The language is too verbose, and unlike Perl and Emacs there are no exponential productivity gains over time. But I agree though, that Python does have some other good things. The OO syntax is neat, there are some great frameworks like Twisted and Django. And there is low barrier to entry which makes new bie feel just at home. The tutorials are just too good. And good standard libraries ship with it.
- overgard 15y ago
  What you're saying seems handwavey and imprecise. What -- specifically -- is wrong with regular expressions and file operations in python? How is white space parsing "not good" for large and nested code blocks? (And why do you have large nested code blocks in the first place? Break those up! Those are hard to read regardless!) And how is there a "java feel"? What does that even mean? And in what way is python verbose? In my experience almost everything about it is almost as terse as possible, from the lack of needing curly braces to the minimalist syntax to naming things like "str" instead of "string"

danssig 15y ago

There is no hoopla outside of the echo chamber. If you want a truly amazing language I would suggest things like Haskell, Racket, Clojure, Erlang, Smalltalk, and/or Common Lisp. If you're looking for more batteries included then I'd suggest Python or perhaps Ruby. Things are always going on in those communities and they've made some great killer apps like Blender (python), Rails (Ruby), Django (Python) and countless more. These languages are just as flexible as Perl, though they have their strengths and weaknesses in different places than Perl does.