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I personally haven't seen any new code being written in Perl during either my time in England or in the Bay Area. I don't really see a reason to use Perl when t
by sim0n 13y ago
I personally haven't seen any new code being written in Perl during either my time in England or in the Bay Area. I don't really see a reason to use Perl when there are languages like Python and Ruby out there with easier learning curves and which are just as, if not more powerful (would be happy to learn some good reasons, though).
- hahainternet 13y agoI am in Manchester. I write new Perl code. Python is Perl with a little nicer syntax and a shitload of baggage from overly opinionated people. Ruby is Perl with a little nicer syntax and no other advantages. I have found no compelling reason to switch, and lots of annoyances that don't seem to exist in Perl.
- Demiurge 13y agoFollowing this logic, every language is Perl with a bit of this or that. Perl was one of the first of the kind, but people saw obvious problems with it and so they innovated with 'little nicer syntax' or 'little better object system'. You might not want any of this, but you can't deny most people are happier with Python or Ruby.
- kamaal 13y agoThis is true for all language that do things right the first time. If you learn C well, everything else(C based languages) look the very same. Perl enjoys that first movers advantage.
- collyw 13y agoThere was a talk by Guido Van Rossum effectively saying that Perl, Python and Ruby are the same language.
- hahainternet 13y agoYou're not wrong, but I wrote that from my perspective, as someone who primarily writes Perl and needs a compelling reason to switch. Obviously someone who was writing code pre-Perl will probably see things a different way.
- aaronem 13y agoI'd say it's more like Perl is every language with a bit of this or that. A sufficiently "skilled" Perl hacker can write everything from bad C, to bad Lisp, to bad Fortran, in Perl -- and most certainly can write plenty of bad Perl in Perl, too. It's writing good Perl that's hard.
- rubiquity 13y agoHaving written some Python I agree. Having written a lot of Ruby I disagree.
- dasil003 13y agoI'm actually a big fan of Perl, but your characterization of Ruby is wrong. Ruby is Perl with object-orientation first, nicer syntax is a minor detail after that.
- ossdev1 13y agoIf Ruby has nice syntax then Smalltalk should be the syntax of the Gods ;)
- lowmagnet 13y agoRuby also now has a VM, which people may or may not find more useful. I for one prefer Ruby 1.9.x to 1.8.x.
- hahainternet 13y agoIt's the only major detail to me, because I can do the majority of what I would use in Ruby, in Perl. Nicer syntax is something I can't do though.
- chromatic 13y agoSee the CPAN module Moops.
- hahainternet 13y agoI'm thinking more of things like the p6 arrow. Moops is part of the first part, things I can already do in Perl that are in Ruby.
- delluminatus 13y agoCan you elaborate on Python's baggage? I'm simply curious.
- hahainternet 13y agoI wouldn't characterise myself as any sort of expert so really I'm just talking about minor things like ternary operators, ugliness with super, scoping, the annoyance of PEP8 being overly specific etc. Just decisions taken for the sake of 'correctness' that end up being annoying. Python isn't so bad, decorators and importing is all very swanky. I find that in general though things tend to be less elegant than intended but the delusion of perfection is maintained. I oppose Python's core philosophy and having used a bunch of Django, that also soured me a bit.
- bmj 13y agoBy this measure, C, or C++, or Ruby must be dead, since I've not seen any new code written in it during my 13 years in the industry. That said, I suspect there are fewer people picking up Perl for the first time for a project these days. My experience with it has always been driven by some degree of "legacy"--someone on the team has experience with the language, and has leveraged CPAN to solve problems. Perl is still my go-to "glue" and tooling language, but that's just because what I know. Would Ruby work? Yeah, probably, but I've not found it to be worth it to learn that language yet.
- sim0n 13y agoI see C and Ruby code being written every day in San Francisco.
- bmj 13y agoSo the bellwether of a language's health is whether it is being used in San Francisco?
- orclev 13y agoTo be fair I see C and C++ used all over the place. Pretty much any game out there has at worst a 50% chance of being written in C++. C is less common, but is still used quite extensively in the open source world. Most devices with firmware are written in C (or at least their drivers are).
- kamaal 13y ago>>easier learning curves and which are just as, if not more powerful (would be happy to learn some good reasons, though). This may be true for Ruby to some extent. But Python as a design goal aims to provide as little power to the programmer as possible. In fact, the Zen of Python says almost anything that comes in the way should and must be sacrificed to achieve readability. One can probably write a book on why one must use Perl. In short, nothing really gets work done as Perl does. That one fact hasn't changed since the past 26 years of Perl's existence.
- elbear 13y agoWhat does power represent to you? Simplicity and readability offer power as far as I'm concerned.
- kamaal 13y agoIn that case Assembly language programming should be sufficient right? That's as simple and readable as it can get.
- lowmagnet 13y agoExcept for the cognitive load you have to keep in your head.
- collyw 13y agoJust because Perl can parse line noise, doesn't mean you can't write readable code. I have seen very unreadable code in Python.
- smonff 13y agoJust ask http://www.builtinperl.com/ http://www.builtinperl.com/ for the reasons why. For exemple don't you know that DuckDuckGo is using a lot of Perl ? Another one, that is huge : YouPorn (itself) is using Catalyst. YOU-PORN! In my opinion, the main Perl's strength is the cpan.org : Stop reinventing wheels, start building space rockets The Comprehensive Perl Archive Network (CPAN) currently has 128,529 Perl modules in 28,883 distributions, written by 11,129 authors, mirrored on 266 servers. The archive has been online since October 1995 and is constantly growing.
- Mic92 13y agoActually youporn, rewrote all their code in PHP: http://highscalability.com/blog/2012/4/2/youporn-targeting-200-million-views-a-day-and-beyond.html http://highscalability.com/blog/2012/4/2/youporn-targeting-2...
- smonff 13y agoDamned ! Here is an information that should be uploaded to Wikipedia.