
I Keep Arriving Back at Perl - fogus
http://blog.sam-pointer.com/2011/02/07/i-keep-arriving-back-at-perl
======
jonathansizz
This article is actually quite revealing. The modern Perl movement clearly
passed this guy by; this is clear from several statements in the article,
beginning with his second sentence. Perl is just seen as it was ten years ago.

So the challenge for those of us who like Perl and would like to see better
coding practices in the language is to spread the modern Perl word beyond the
confines of the Perl echo chamber.

This clearly isn't happening yet: instead Perl is seen as an ancient language
only good for knocking up a quick script in an emergency.

Oh, and loewenskind: if you _had_ read the article, you'd see it's far from
'blatant fanboy nonsense'. At best it is a mean and backhanded compliment.

~~~
Kaizyn
You know, the Perl community could just release Perl 6 finally so they had the
"shiny new language" to point to whenever someone talks about the old days of
Perl.

~~~
mst
The latest version of perl is revision 5 version 12.

The 12 is the major version number.

There is also a separate language called perl6 that we steal ideas from. But
while the perl and perl6 communities share a fair few members, they aren't
really the same community.

If you find this confusing, I suggest you do what myself - and a number of the
Rakudo Perl6 developers - are finding ourselves doing, and referring to the
perl6 spec as "Camelia" instead to reduce the number of people confusing it
with perl.

~~~
chromatic
Zero _is_ a number, but you confuse people that way.

------
zdw
Did it last week. Been tooling around with Ruby (MacRuby actually), and had a
data processing task that required round tripping to Excel - CPAN to the
rescue.

Because of it's age, there's just a greater number of codebases out there that
can do esoteric and unusual stuff - I tend to think that languages that share
easy interop through a shared runtime (Cocoa/Macruby, Java/Scala/JRuby, etc.)
might be the future of that concept.

~~~
getsat
Why didn't you install a gem for spreadsheet manipulation?

~~~
zdw
Everyone involved is on a Mac, and the ruby code to control Excel is OLE
based, thus Windows only. Also, the files are .xls, which doesn't have a
writer method in ruby (that I'm aware of), although there is an .xlsx library.

Perl's ParseExcel and WriteExcel worked great in this case, and easily handle
edge cases like leading zeros on zipcodes, formatting directives, etc.

As always YMMV.

~~~
andrewcarpenter
I've used the Ruby spreadsheet gem with success. It's a bit old, but works ok.

<http://spreadsheet.rubyforge.org/>

~~~
zdw
Ah, a port of Perl's module... good to know.

Makes you wonder how soon it'll be before languages that are out of favor but
have great libraries written for them are mainly viewed as targets for mining
ideas and techniques, like how the various open source kernel developers use
each other's kernels as driver documentation.

------
matthavener
I wonder if he's returning to perl because its inherently a better language
for parsing, or if he's just incredibly comfortable with the succinct regex
and string parsing syntax in perl? I've found myself going back to perl, but
usually because I know how to do it in perl and I'm too time-pressed to learn
how to do it in python, shell scripting, or something else

~~~
prog
Perl can definitely be more compact than Python for regex and parsing but I am
surprised that he need to move from Ruby to Perl. Ruby borrows much of the
regex and quote syntax from Perl.

------
gte910h
I'm not trying to start a war here. Python and Ruby both have their place.
Just saying, this is a ruby users problem, generally speaking, not a python
user's problem.

I actually find that this is one of the weaknesses of ruby (vs python): People
who prefer it also know perl and can stand working with perl. The python
people can't stand perl largely, and make a billion python modules. So, we
have lots of python modules duplicating perl modules cause after python,
people were unwilling to return to perl.

~~~
wycats
I am not aware of a significant number of Ruby developers who jump back to
Perl instead of writing Ruby libraries. I'm not sure where you got that
impression from.

~~~
gte910h
Ruby developers I've worked with who've done exactly what the guy in the
article did?

"Yo Sam, what's the .pl file. Is that from a tool? Naw, the perl library is
really nice...I'd have had to write the parser if I did it in Ruby"

Most of the Ruby developers I know are in their 30's and all but 2 know perl.
That may be the difference.

------
skarayan
I was a passionate PERL developer for many years. Then, one day, I met Ruby.

I don't think I will ever go back, mostly because I love how Ruby does objects
and it has a nicer syntax.

~~~
rjbond3rd
Judging from your caps, I'm guessing that was back in 1987? It's been "Perl"
since 1991 :)

~~~
btilly
Actually it has been Perl since 1987. The Practical Extraction and Report
Language/Pathologically Eclectic Rubbish Lister joke has been part of the
language from the start.

------
toadi
I was a perl enthusiast in the day. But those times are long gone. But I must
agree when in a pinch and I need string manipulation or some quick script that
is just bit to complicated for bash to handle I'll write some perl :)

~~~
rjbond3rd
As a "not old" Perl programmer, I am puzzled by all these old-timers who feel
the need to say they "aren't into Perl anymore." That's fine. I'm not into
Windows anymore, but I don't go around telling everyone :)

It seems to me the people who "aren't into Perl anymore" were not the gurus
who built CPAN. Maybe it's fair to say that Perl isn't that into you, either?
(All in good fun :)

~~~
kgtm
The problem with Perl is that those that "aren't into Perl anymore." are
louder than those who are.

~~~
loewenskind
Please don't say that. The people who are into it are too loud as it is. If
someone popped up every now and then and said "Yea, it was a great ride into
work this morning with my horse & buggy." Of course most people's response is
going to be "hrm, yea I've rode in one of those before but it doesn't make
much practical sense now".

NOTE: I'm not saying that perl is literally as obsolete as a horse & buggy but
rather for most programmers to day it may as well be.

~~~
rjbond3rd
> it doesn't make much practical sense now

It helps to read the artice? Anyway, it's my goal to avoid "most programmers."

~~~
loewenskind
Again, my comment isn't about the article.

~~~
rjbond3rd
FYI, the article is shorter than all your comments. _cough_

~~~
loewenskind
Which further illustrates my point. What is the point of posting 4 or 5
paragraphs from someone clueless about the subject they're talking about?

~~~
rjbond3rd
Everything illustrates your point, methinks :)

------
mikecaron
I certainly feel the same pull. My time on Hacker News has led me to pursue
Python vigorously and I have found that there are certain things that Perl is
just less verbose with. The thing that I don't like about it is that is so
easy for n00bs to screw up and it's very easy to write poor Perl code.
CPAN/easy_install... it's two jelly bellys in the same bag to me.

------
stcredzero
Would it be allowed to "package" a library implemented in Perl as a component
in an iPhone app? Lua is allowed for implementing "a part" of the
functionality in many apps. What if the Perl libraries were packaged as
source-less runtimes with the ability to compile of eval?

------
loewenskind
TL;DR: I sometimes need to do some scripting and I use perl because I know it.

So what? Flagged. This is blatant fanboy nonsense. Nothing remotely of
interest here.

~~~
windsurfer
I guess this is supposed to be a discussion-starter. The author talks about
some things that are slightly controversial.

~~~
loewenskind
I didn't see anything very controversial for Hacker News. Perhaps for
perlmonks.

