4 ms·

I always forget that DDG is written with Perl, even after I emailed yegg a million years ago asking why they used Perl, and he responded back, which was nice of

by _swfb 2y ago

I always forget that DDG is written with Perl, even after I emailed yegg a million years ago asking why they used Perl, and he responded back, which was nice of him. I hear Raku is fun, I haven't used it, but I sort of swore a soft oath that I would never touch Perl again about a decade ago after having to debug some regex magic someone did. I'm assuming that once you get past the "hump", Perl becomes fun?

sigzero 2y ago
Raku is Perl on steroids "basically". It is still pretty slow the last I read something on it. I always enjoyed Perl even as a beginner.
orev 2y ago
Regex and is a separate language used by many tools, Perl just made it nicely integrated into the language, and also made some nice enhancements. Don’t blame issues with regex on Perl.
SushiHippie 2y ago
> [...] asking why they used Perl, and he responded back, which was nice of him. Do you still know what the reason was?
- _swfb 2y ago
  I actually still have the email. Here's what I sent: Hello! I don't have a lot to say to you, but I just wanted to say that about a month ago, I started the transition away from Google, and the most obvious thing to switch was search. DuckDuckGo has improved substantially since the last time I used it (around 2012), and it's to a point where the results are comparable, and sometimes even better than Google, so changing was pretty seamless. Now the only Google-thing I need to remove from my life is YouTube. As a somewhat technical person, I was curious about one thing; I saw that the primary language for DuckDuckGo is Perl. Without making any judgement here, was there a particular reason for that choice? Also, are you planning to move to Perl 6? Anyway, I appreciate you reading my email. DuckDuckGo is a great service, and I hope you guys keep up the good work! -Thomas Gebert. Here was his response: Yes, though, the primary language is Perl. It was out of convenience and interest since that was my primary language when I started the project. There was/are a lot of libraries useful for text processing / web crawling. Now Python and other libraries have been similarly built up.
  - SushiHippie 2y ago
    Amazing, thanks for sharing! What year was this? (I'm Curious, as you mentioned 2012 was the last year you used at the time of the E-Mail)
    - _swfb 2y ago
      It's actually more recent than I thought, looks like it was 2018. I would have sworn it was earlier but I can see the "sent" timestamp on ProtonMail.
      - SushiHippie 2y ago
        2018 is still a long time ago, so that's totally understandable haha Thank you!
        creer 2y ago
        Always makes me laugh when I read things like "2018 is still a long time ago" (no offense or downvote). But also the very thing that perl fought against. Your programming is not going to break for a long time (much longer than 6 years) because there is no reason for language features to change that quickly - certainly compsci theory does not change anywhere that fast. It takes time to build very large projects like a large, layered programming language, and it should be normal to take many years to learn all the features of something like perl or raku. Because there should be no reason to do it all at once rather than be productive in the meantime. So anyway, 6 years should not be much in the career of a programming language.
hnisoss 2y ago
It s just a lang like any other. Even ASM you can write fairly easily if you do it for years. Raku is quite damn cool, you should check it out a bit. As felix[1] said, it realy is something like bash and python having a cool cousin. [1] https://felix-knorr.net/posts/2023-06-24-raku-is-awesome.html https://felix-knorr.net/posts/2023-06-24-raku-is-awesome.htm...
- conor- 2y ago
  Wasn't the original benefit of Perl that it was fairly close to a standard tool, i.e. it was available on pretty much any server you would be pushing a script to anyways? Raku doesn't seem to have the same ubiquity, while Python is generally available on any system, or even Perl5 is still widely available on pretty much any system. I'd love to start using Raku more but it seems like a hard sell over Python or Bash
landyacht 2y ago
Perl and Raku are grouped together today primarily for historical reasons. Yes, Raku started as Perl 6 and is certainly a Perl-inspired language, but the rename happened precisely because it is so different. Regarding regexes, Raku introduces a whole new syntax, makes whitespace non-meaningful by default, and allows regexes to be named and then composed/reused. Those three changes, along with helpful modules like Grammar::Tracer, make reading and writing regexes a totally different experience. It's still going to look like noise at first, of course, but even then the syntax parallels normal code far better than PCREs, so you're more likely to make a correct guess about what something means.
creer 2y ago
raku is amazing. It's perl to the power of perl. Which is why I adopted it. I used perl for its power and expressiveness, and for its layering (never having to learn the entire language at once: one feature at a time is fine). Raku does not disappoint and is a stellar successor (and I'll never know the whole thing :-). Regarding your oath, it's been 10 years and perhaps you are better now at learning language features. Raku's documentation is very good ... but a very different format that perl. And raku doubled down on regex documentation and structuring ideas (which are completely applicable to refactoring somebody else's regex). And the usual forums are excellent at helping with raku questions.

by _swfb 2y ago

sigzero 2y ago

Raku is Perl on steroids "basically". It is still pretty slow the last I read something on it. I always enjoyed Perl even as a beginner.

orev 2y ago

Regex and is a separate language used by many tools, Perl just made it nicely integrated into the language, and also made some nice enhancements. Don’t blame issues with regex on Perl.

SushiHippie 2y ago

> [...] asking why they used Perl, and he responded back, which was nice of him. Do you still know what the reason was?

_swfb 2y ago
I actually still have the email. Here's what I sent: Hello! I don't have a lot to say to you, but I just wanted to say that about a month ago, I started the transition away from Google, and the most obvious thing to switch was search. DuckDuckGo has improved substantially since the last time I used it (around 2012), and it's to a point where the results are comparable, and sometimes even better than Google, so changing was pretty seamless. Now the only Google-thing I need to remove from my life is YouTube. As a somewhat technical person, I was curious about one thing; I saw that the primary language for DuckDuckGo is Perl. Without making any judgement here, was there a particular reason for that choice? Also, are you planning to move to Perl 6? Anyway, I appreciate you reading my email. DuckDuckGo is a great service, and I hope you guys keep up the good work! -Thomas Gebert. Here was his response: Yes, though, the primary language is Perl. It was out of convenience and interest since that was my primary language when I started the project. There was/are a lot of libraries useful for text processing / web crawling. Now Python and other libraries have been similarly built up.
- SushiHippie 2y ago
  Amazing, thanks for sharing! What year was this? (I'm Curious, as you mentioned 2012 was the last year you used at the time of the E-Mail)
  - _swfb 2y ago
    It's actually more recent than I thought, looks like it was 2018. I would have sworn it was earlier but I can see the "sent" timestamp on ProtonMail.
    - SushiHippie 2y ago
      2018 is still a long time ago, so that's totally understandable haha Thank you!
      - creer 2y ago
        Always makes me laugh when I read things like "2018 is still a long time ago" (no offense or downvote). But also the very thing that perl fought against. Your programming is not going to break for a long time (much longer than 6 years) because there is no reason for language features to change that quickly - certainly compsci theory does not change anywhere that fast. It takes time to build very large projects like a large, layered programming language, and it should be normal to take many years to learn all the features of something like perl or raku. Because there should be no reason to do it all at once rather than be productive in the meantime. So anyway, 6 years should not be much in the career of a programming language.

hnisoss 2y ago

It s just a lang like any other. Even ASM you can write fairly easily if you do it for years. Raku is quite damn cool, you should check it out a bit. As felix[1] said, it realy is something like bash and python having a cool cousin. [1] https://felix-knorr.net/posts/2023-06-24-raku-is-awesome.html https://felix-knorr.net/posts/2023-06-24-raku-is-awesome.htm...

conor- 2y ago
Wasn't the original benefit of Perl that it was fairly close to a standard tool, i.e. it was available on pretty much any server you would be pushing a script to anyways? Raku doesn't seem to have the same ubiquity, while Python is generally available on any system, or even Perl5 is still widely available on pretty much any system. I'd love to start using Raku more but it seems like a hard sell over Python or Bash

landyacht 2y ago

Perl and Raku are grouped together today primarily for historical reasons. Yes, Raku started as Perl 6 and is certainly a Perl-inspired language, but the rename happened precisely because it is so different. Regarding regexes, Raku introduces a whole new syntax, makes whitespace non-meaningful by default, and allows regexes to be named and then composed/reused. Those three changes, along with helpful modules like Grammar::Tracer, make reading and writing regexes a totally different experience. It's still going to look like noise at first, of course, but even then the syntax parallels normal code far better than PCREs, so you're more likely to make a correct guess about what something means.

creer 2y ago

raku is amazing. It's perl to the power of perl. Which is why I adopted it. I used perl for its power and expressiveness, and for its layering (never having to learn the entire language at once: one feature at a time is fine). Raku does not disappoint and is a stellar successor (and I'll never know the whole thing :-). Regarding your oath, it's been 10 years and perhaps you are better now at learning language features. Raku's documentation is very good ... but a very different format that perl. And raku doubled down on regex documentation and structuring ideas (which are completely applicable to refactoring somebody else's regex). And the usual forums are excellent at helping with raku questions.