
"Practical" modern Perl for Ruby/Python people - r11t
http://bulknews.typepad.com/blog/2010/03/practical-modern-perl-for-rubypython-people.html
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andrewvc
Interesting, Perl's come a long way since I picked it up in 2001 (and dropped
it for Ruby in 2007), but it just doesn't feel organic to the language.

Sadly, things like Perl 5i <http://github.com/schwern/perl5i>, while awesome
in the service they provide the Perl community, just make me wonder why one
would even use a language that makes you go there.

Stumbling across a Perl script these days feels like finding an Awk script;
it's nostalgic and interesting, but I generally just want to stay away.

~~~
jrockway
Yeah, perl5i is a little much all at once. It feels like, "lets apply as many
hacks to the language as possible all at once, for maximum blogability".
Adding methods to every class? Random autoboxing? It's like I'm looking at
Ruby ;)

But the real point of the article is about how flexible Perl is, and how it
has all the stuff from your favorite of Python / Ruby, and _also_ the CPAN. No
other language seems to want to steal from Perl, because "it's Perl", but
fortunately, we don't have that problem -- we already got over using Perl, and
can enjoy the features for what they are, regardless of which religion
invented them.

Now is a great time to be a Perl programmer, and it's sad that people dismiss
it as "cool like an Awk script" instead of embrace it as "a tool that can save
me time when I'm building complex applications". Sigh.

~~~
luckyland
As a Perl defender, I don't feel any less clever doing things the Ruby way.

I don't mean to be dismissive, either, but Perl over the years has distilled,
and what we got out of it in the end wasn't Perl.

~~~
jrockway
Care to elaborate?

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pmccool
Yeah, perl's bad reputation is undeserved in some ways. My definition of a bad
language is one that _forces_ you to code in "bad" ways. There's very little
that perl forces you to do. Insofar as it's bad, it's bad in a very different
way to, say, VBScript.

~~~
andrewcooke
unfortunately that logic still only makes perl a neutral language, not a good
one.

(i haven't used perl for years, but this isn't intended as a snark against the
language, just a comment on the fact that saying something "is not bad" does
not necessarily mean that it is "good")

~~~
berntb
>>unfortunately that logic still only makes perl a neutral language, not a
good one.

Well.. If you believe that flexibility isn't a good thing.

Edit: Flexibility do imply a need for coding standards and buying copies of
"Perl best practices".

