No, we are not all like that. Fortunately. The author states:
"A bunch of new people started at work and we use a lot of Perl in our department. So I put together some information about Perl and I thought it might be worth sharing so here it is."
No, there’s nothing inherently wrong with it. I’ve run across two distinct sets of Perl mongers, though:
- “We have lots of deployed code and don’t want to rewrite the whole thing.” That’s valid (although I still urge them to consider the hiring challenges down the road).
- “I’ve used Perl exclusively since I downloaded it over dialup and I’m not interested in those shiny new languages the kids like.” Run screaming.
It is helpful for people who were paying attention to the perl community with any passing interest at any time in the past 20 years. It is not helpful for people who weren't. But the former describes a lot of people here.
I'm not saying that yours is not a valid data point, but "developing in perl" strikes me as likely to be a fairly tiny subset even of developers in general.
The mentions of Perl do seem pretty heavy-handed. I'm a Perl developer in the sysadmin space, too (working on Webmin, Virtualmin, and Cloudmin), and I think it's awesome to see new tools being written in Perl. And, I agree that Perl is still the best tool for the job for many sysadmin tasks. But, you probably don't need to mention it 20 times (yes, it's mentioned 20 times; a half dozen times in just the first few sentences) on one page.
Oh I know it still exists, but while this is admittedly anecdotal on my part (and likely heavily biased by the institutions I've been a part of) I haven't seen a single new person who defaults to Perl in a very, very, very long time.
And to be clear, I'm not trying to rip the author or the article, it just seems ... oddly timed, like writing a contemporary article on how to use COBOL in the business computing space.
Oh definitely the attitude exists. I just never saw it directed at Perl. Maybe since, in my experience, Perl has mostly be used as a system language and not a application development language.
Sure! In the end, there's not much that could really be said to definitively settle this besides a survey of a sizable amount of the Perl community. All we're left with is what our own preference is, and what's stuck out to us from books, blog posts, comments and meetings, which is very prone to confirmation bias. In the end, even if the consensus is it's better not done, I don't doubt it would be on the lighter side of ways you could disappoint coworkers. It's only really confusing to the Perl amateur. That's sort of what I meant by coworkers and dirty looks, rather than suggest your coworker will forcibly change your code for their own sanity. ;)
> That is a sample of one. Try visiting a YAPC and you'll see a sample of 1000+ that is opposite to your's.
Sure, i never said that no one likes Perl. I'm well aware that many people like Perl. This may sound harsh, but here is my impressions of the people i've personally talked to that use Perl (please don't take that personal, i'm well aware that there are A LOT of good programmers out there):
- Typically too lazy to learn a new language or even new paradigms (often enough aren't interested in OO style programming or even basic best practices, code conventions, some of them i had a hard time to even convince using a VCS!)
And you don't believe how many people like this are out there (not related to Perl, but in every area)!
A basic problem: Perl allows them to hack away all day and write hideous code that ensures they will never get fired. Due to their laziness the script will be undocumented, lack basic error checking, will have myriads of bugs and often fail, but no one except them will be able to fix it in a reasonable time frame.
This is where you will be upset and think i am really unjust and a troll: I'm stating that Perl supports this behavior like no other language. (except maybe brainfuck ;) )
My basic statement about Perl: It is possible to write readable, tested and maintainable code in Perl. BUT it is hard if not impossible with just the base language. It is by far easier to get it wrong then to get it right in Perl for the newcomer or average programmer.
> What you said has nothing to do with what you quoted. CPAN allows you to email those authors and the vast majority will reply happily. And even in cases where they don't, it's easy to go on irc.perl.org and ask around in #perl.
I must admit that i didn't write a mail to an author. I don't consider this a good way to discuss problems with modules anyway, since this results in closed discussion and won't help anyone with the same problem in the future. A forum, bugtracker or other means of collaboration software is far better suited for this, IMO. This may be a nice addition to CPAN, imo, having discussions on the modules.. probably linked on the module page.. Just dreaming here.. :)
At the end (as i have said) CPAN is probably the biggest advantage of Perl.
> Did you try asking around? Look for alternatives? Often that is because the remaining bugs are no dealbreakers (license nitpicks anyone?) or the modules have been determined to be crap (XML::Simple).
I don't want to ask around for two weeks, i want to work and get started. Time is money.
Config::Simple (is it crap too? i don't know now anymore) contains quite some bugs that are marked as important for a few years now.
So a module is stopped being developed and determined as being crap but how do i know that from the look at CPAN?!
I'm not sure if i should go on here and just search CPAN for other modules for example. I can't really convince you here but the overall feeling of browsing CPAN for modules is that there is a lot of old and outdated stuff in there, no discussions, no way to tell what is best to use, what is maintained. If you don't see it like that, then ok, but that's not only my impression. I looked at the CPAN statistics page but unfortunately i can't find usable statistics for my cause. Is there a statistic that shows the average time since the last update for all modules over the years? May be not a good statistic.. mhh... Amount of new package versions uploaded overall? Amount of fixed/open bugs? A TOP100 of most active modules?
> `use warnings FATAL => 'all';`
Tried that, but somehow it didn't work for everything, i'm not sure if some module was misbehaving.
> `my @hits = grep { $_ eq 'dogfood' } @array;`
> Alternatively:
> `use List::Util 'first'; my $has_dogfood = first { $_ eq 'dogfood' } @array;`
> And this is in core.
I think i was picking on the "search" too much, actually i meant the whole handling of arrays. Try to remove an item in the middle. Try to find which position element X has and delete or move this element. Stuff like that. It's really not as nice as in pretty much every other major language. The hint at List::Util is good but List::Util is really just a small list of functions.
Example: Looking for an element and deleting it? (Taken from perlmonks.org)
my @array = qw( your array here );
my $search_for = "here";
my( $index )= grep { $array[$_] eq $search_for } 0..$#array;
splice @array, $index, 1
I'm sorry, but this is hideous, really. Just to show you an example of what "modern" languages can do:
Unforunately i have read this statement in a magazine about Perl 6 and some tutorials for it. I don't have this magazine anymore but it's a quite respected IT journal in germany (i'x from Heise). I am trying to find prove.
> Well how nice to show at the end at least that you're a troll.
Sorry to have wasted your time, then. No, honestly. I can see how Perl can be used as a very powerful replacement for bash scripts, but i can't see it as a serious choice for a large product programmed by dozens of people (surely you now head of to show me examples of Perl software. This doesn't change my mind, though. There probably even is a significantly large program written in brainfuck, this wouldn't convince me to use it, though.)
Last Note: I may sound like harsh, bitter or trolling and i feel that HN is not the right place to have this discussion. I'm surprised that i haven't been downvoted to hell, but i think i am quite alone with my opinion here.. Rest assured that i had this discussion with other IT guys in the past and i'm not alone..
Not at all. I rather wrote this to illustrate how critical legacy software is created, operated and evolved over time, but it seems that readers can't get past immediately defending/bashing Perl.
"Perl is a molotov cocktail, it was probably useful once, but few people use it now."
Yikes! I've worked for big tech companies you've heard of and Perl is all over the place and used in real production projects. We also regularly choose it for new projects.
"A bunch of new people started at work and we use a lot of Perl in our department. So I put together some information about Perl and I thought it might be worth sharing so here it is."
For that purpose, it is fine.
reply