Slashdot Mirror

The language for a specific Java version might be consistent but the libraries won't be. Between 1.3, 1.4, and 1.5 there were/are huge changes in the language and libraries, some which broke some of our applications because they went ahead and deprecated some functionality.

I agree that C and Javascript are also a huge pain to work with between versions but you can't say the same about perl. Perl has maintained an incredible job at being backwards compatible with some pretty ugly code. We've been able to take perl code that was written 6 to 8 years ago under perl 5.5 and dump it on perl 5.8.7 without any changes. Some perl libraries you can get from cpan are only compatible with a certain newer version of perl (usually 5.6) but that's because they probably utilize/need newer features in perl. The same is true for Java where 1.4.2 has things that 1.3 didn't have and 1.5 has things that 1.4 didn't have.

You also mention ActiveState perl which kinda went in their own direction as far as packages and other things. But if you want perl for windows that is closer to perl for nix then you might want to try Strawberry perl. Strawberry perl includes a Mingw C/C++ compiler and a "make" tool so you can use cpan.

Their about page calls it the "perl interpreter" multiple times. How is it not an interpreted language?

There's already a built in regular expression tutorial:

... because it was a one-off scientific visualization, and writing in Perl Data Language minimized coding time. Sure, it took two hours to render a scene of the solar corona as seen from a spacecraft flying through it, while an implementation in C might have taken a few hundred milliseconds -- but it only took me a week to code up and debug, and if I were writing in C it would have taken at least a month.

So he's saying PERL is easy to read?

You're probably thinking of the web programming language PERL, which is basically a joke. This article is about Perl.

Oops... I were to write ~ instead, but suddenly I think I might recall wrong so I check the Apocalypse at http://dev.perl.org/perl6/doc/design/apo/A03.html. It turned out that it is dangerous to skim an entry there without reading it carefully to find the "[Update]" line.

> What motivation can anyone have for upgrading to this new version

See their FAQ at http://dev.perl.org/perl6/faq.html to see the feature list of the Perl 6 language. Myself is very impressed, and probably will have no problem finding motivation if the language is really there.

> when the first thing they'll have to do is go back through all their old scripts and change out every "." to an "_" ?

My understanding about the plan is that you don't have to (most of the time). For code that is still actively maintained, a converter will turn it from using the v5 syntax to using v6 syntax, and you will then catch up the imperfection manually which is hopefully not too much to deal with. You will have to retrain your fingers to type "_" when you would now type ".", though. For code that is no longer maintained, the code will run unchanged, which means they will not be able to use any of the new features of the language, but at the same time this doesn't matter so much (it is not maintained, right?). Furthermore, it probably will be able to detect whether a library is written in Perl 5 or Perl 6, since Perl 6 do not use the "package" keyword that appears in essentially every Perl 5 library (it uses "module" and "class" instead).

Under the new architecture of Perl 6, its runtime (called Parrot) will be able to handle not just Perl 6, but also Perl 5, as well as a whole suite of other languages like BASIC, C, Lisp, Lua, M4, Python, Ruby, Scheme, Tcl, etc. Each of them, like Perl 6, will be interpreted by a separate interpreter into some intermediate representation (PIR) or into the Perl assembly language (PASM) before getting JIT compiled into machine code. PIR and PASM are Perl-aware but not Perl-specific. In other words, the Perl 5 under Perl 6 is not really a "compatibility mode", but instead a "new implementation" of the Perl 5 syntax (as well as other language syntax) targeting Parrot. And once in PASM or PIR, the code written in all these languages looks the same, so it is possible to write Perl 6 that create objects from classes written in Python, which then call functions written in Scheme, etc., which is also a rather exciting promise for me.

> why the fuck did they change it to an "_" in the first place ?

I think the idea is that it want to be in line with other recent languages, all using "." (rather than something like "->") as separator between object identifier and method name. Which is quite reasonable given that the language is on design not backward compatible and should, as I've said, be treated as a completely new language rather than a new version. There are a lot of habits that you will have to break anyway.

> I'll be sticking with 5.005 which has served me well for 7 years.

For me it didn't. There are many useful stuffs in CPAN that will not work at all under 5.005. Upgrade to 5.10 is not that bad, why not make a try?

I'm very happy to see something productive out of the Parrot community. They've promised some great things, and we've been waiting a long time to use their offerings. Some people in the community (see article below) have started to doubt the Parrot project's usefulness, but maybe this cool Perl6 development will make them re-think their stance.

Will Parrot ever truly deliver? (http://pinderkent.blogsavy.com/archives/124)

Earlier today I was reading an article about Parrot. Parrot is, as stated on the projects Web site, a virtual machine designed to efficiently compile and execute bytecode for dynamic languages. Parrot currently hosts a variety of language implementations in various stages of completion, including Tcl, Javascript, Ruby, Lua, Scheme, PHP, Python, Perl 6, APL, and a .NET bytecode translator.

So Parrot does sound like an interesting piece of technology. Its understandable how a common runtime for scripting languages could prove beneficial. But will it ever be a platform suitable for serious, production usage? I have my doubts.

Parrot has been under active development for quite some time now. The initial 0.0.1 release was made on September 10, 2001. During 2007, weve seen a release every month or so. So a lot of effort has been put into Parrot over the past six years. It has surpassed one of the major stumbling blocks with many Open Source projects, in that it has managed to build at least some development momentum. Unfortunately for its supporters, Parrot has never really seemed to catch on. I think there are a number of reasons for this.

Stability is probably the first problem. I dont mean stability in terms of the runtime crashing, or anything of that sort. Im talking about concept stability. There has always seemed to be a relatively large amount of change between releases. While this is good, in that there are improvements being made and new ideas being implemented, this causes problems for users who want to build reliably upon Parrot. Individuals and businesses often do not, or cannot, invest the time and effort to track a continually-moving target like Parrot.

The language implementations for Parrot, while many in number, have been of limited use. Looking at the status messages of some of the most promising and practical language implementations shows why this might be the case. Such messages include:

• Incomplete - but all examples and test cases are working. (Amber for Parrot)
• Most of the samples work. (BASIC/compiler)
• Has been broken for a long time. (BASIC/interpreter)
• Parser is pretty complete. Generates PIR for basic Ruby programs (Cardinal, Ruby CVS Head 1.9 implementation)
• Functioning, all samples working, lacks IO routines (Cola)
• Working for some simple forms. Due to some broken features, most of the bootstrapping code has been commented out. (Common Lisp)
• Functioning for handcrafted test cases. Loading frozen state is currently broken. Far from complete. (Parrot m4)
• This project has been abandoned. Any takers? (Pint, an experimental PHP implementation)
• Passes nearly 25% of tcls (lightly converted) test suite, using a Test::More like harness. (Tcl)

So while there are many interesting language implementation projects for smaller or more obscure languages that have reached further stages of completion, the ones that were most likely to be of practical use seem to be lacking. Now, this is understandable. Maintaining a suitably complete Ruby, Python, Perl or Tcl implementati

Perl was created by Larry Wall, who worked for NASA, not NSA. Specifically, the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory at Caltech.

SELinux consists of modifications to Linux operating systems to conform to certain guidelines.

But yes, the government has a history of willing participation in open source software and open standards. Today, it's even more defined. That much of the government involved in routine business and administrative operations still can't break away from the Windows paradigm isn't an indictment of open source software.

In fact, the opposite is the case. Tom Christiansen and some other Perl hackers wrote Perl Power Tools (PPT), which provided a pure Perl implementation of various Unix commands. That means that it was like having Unix on top of Perl. Perl Power Tools Background on PPT

All Perl needs is a C compiler, and a standard C library. It runs just about everywhere people want it to.

*cool* - thanks!

Linkage for others. Status: "Parser is pretty complete. Generates PIR for basic Ruby programs"

Parallel New World: http://www.jnthn.net/papers/2007-fpw-parallelism-slides.pdf

See also http://dev.perl.org/perl6/

Up until the last year or two, there wasn't much progress (or at least *visible* progress) on Perl 6. If you look now though, there's a fair bit of tangible work being completed, e.g. Parrot 0.5 was just released, along with the Parrot Roadmap.

As with many OSS projects, the main impediment at the moment is not having enough man hours available to complete the work. But I think it's fairly obvious it's not complete vapourware.

If Perl 6 does everything it says it will, and happens to get it's timing right, it could be huge. It might be the first OSS language to take the sort of status the Java has now, and COBOL used to have. Or it could be of little use to anyone. As I said earlier, I don't think anyone really knows.

Larry & Co are on the right track, and you know it, really.

perl5 is everywhere and perl6 will be a faster, more flexible, powerful and expressive perl than perl5. My guess is that all *NIX systems will have it in their repos within a week after release, CPAN growth will accelerate, n Linux distros will have new system configuration tools written in it for their next release... and biosciences will find the universal cure for cancer X years quicker ;-)

Now if you want to monitor perl6 developments I recommend grabbing the feeds from Planet Perl Six http://planetsix.perl.org/ and check http://www.perlfoundation.org/perl6/index.cgi for more info.

Larry has an appealing balance between academic beard striking and pragmatism in his ideas and I am sure we will all benefit from perl6. And yes perl6 will be a wonderful mix of cleaned up oddities, new ideas and stolen concepts...

"All Your Paradigms Are Belong To Us"

The summaries ended in 2006...
http://dev.perl.org/perl6/list-summaries/

Does that mean the future is over?

Like so many other "good" languages, PERL is quickly becoming a dinosaur. At least with PERL, we do have a number of decent replacements...

What are you talking about? PERL was never a good language. Fortunately, it was never as popular as Perl, despite having a confusingly similar name.

Why didn't they use Catalyst? http://catalyst.perl.org/

There are a number of people in the wider Perl community who are basically only known by their online nick name.

One of the most proliic of such people is chromatic. Although it's his real name, brian d foy is also well known.

There are a number of people in the wider Perl community who are basically only known by their online nick name.

One of the most proliic of such people is chromatic. Although it's his real name, brian d foy is also well known.

How can you know what language it was? You can do stuff like that in Perl 6. It's somewhere in the Synopses.

For that matter, if [Perl 6] ever gets released, and if Python gets ported to Parrot -- not very likely, I know...

Actually, people are working on it. It's Pynie; Patrick Michaud wrote a basic compiler for it in about eight hours.

I find it strange that nobody yet has given a reference to Catalyst, the best MVC framework for Perl. From people that have tried both (not me), it is said to be the equivalent of RoR for Perl. I can't back that because I'm a perl monk and I don't have time for yet another language (what for, when you have already tried the best language ? ;-)

Application skeleton and database CRUD in 30 seconds (measured!!!). Try it.

Perl is not an acronym. Those of us who have spent time in the Perl community know this, and it's a fairly quick way to identify outsiders and newbies.

http://faq.perl.org/perlfaq1.html#What_s_the_diffe renc

Perl has always had a compiler: your source is compiled into an internal form (a parse tree) which is then optimized before being run.

The difference between interpreted languages and compiled languages these days is largely academic.

Hell, even Java has JSPs, which use Java like a scripting language.

Python is not compiled. Perl is not compiled. Javascript is not compiled. These languages are read in, line by line, and executed.

You fail it.

Nope, you're wrong. There's lots of special behavior that you get with the empty <> that you don't get with <STDIN>. The special behaviors are particularly useful for writing filters (programs that read from and write to other programs via pipes) but they can be useful for standalone programs too. In fact, <STDIN> is particularly bad for writing filters.

See perlop - I/O Operators, scrolling down a bit to "The null filehandle <> is special...", and Perl Best Practices #135, Avoid using *STDIN unless you really mean it.

I've killed some time on this since it's a pretty interesting idea. It turns out there are plenty outside the D and F range. It does seem to like pages with a single Flash object and not much else, so that's bad. It also makes some pretty arbitrary decisions which don't mean squat to many sites. There are some sites that get enough traffic that speed is a factor but not so much that a content delivery network is really necessary, for example.

I skipped the actual link and score on sites that are pretty much just representative of the sites around them. I wanted to include them by name, though, to show where they fall. I've stuck mostly to main index pages, and I've noted where I've gone deeper.

A: Google (99%), Altavista main page (98%), Altavista Babelfish (90%) (including upon doing a translation from English to French), Craigslist (96%), Pricewatch (93%), Slackware Linux, OpenBSD, Led Zeppelin site at Atlantic (100%), supremecommander.com, w3m web browser site (96%)

B: Apache.org (87%), the lighttpd web server (84%), Google Maps, which also got a C once (84% in most cases), Perlmonks (84%), Dragonfly BSD (85%), Butthole Surfers band page (81%), 37 Signals

C: One Laptop Per Child,, ESR's homepage, the Open Source Initiative (78%), Google News (73%), Lucid CMS (74%), Perl.org (75%), lucasfilm.com, Charred Dirt game

D: gnu.org, The Register, A9 (66%), kernel.org, Akamai (64%), kuro5hin.org, freshmeat.net, linuxcd.org, Movable Type (61%), Postnuke, blogster.com, Joel on Software (67%), Fog Creek Software, metallica.com, gaspowered.com, Scorched 3D (68%), id software (64%), ISBN.nu book search

F: MS IIS (49%), microsoft.com, msn.com, linux.com, fsf.org, discovery.com, newegg.com, rackspace.com, the Simtel archive (26%), CNet Download (29%), Adobe (58%), savvis.com, mtv.com, sun.com, pclinuxos.com, freebsd.org, phpnuke.org, use.perl.org, ruby-lang.org, python.org, java.com, Rolling Stones band page (56%), powellsbooks.com, amazon.com, barnesandnoble.com, getfirefox.com

My site for my company (96%) gets an A (no, I'm not going to get it slashdotted) which is pretty simple but has a pic and some Javascript on it. Several sites I have done or have helped design with someone else get C or D ratings.

You know nothing.

Is that a proper and credible source? Or do you want me to get Larry Wall to ring you up and explain it personally? Also, Perl was first written in the late 80s. When you first learned of it was no where near "the very beginning". Look, I'm sorry about being a sarcastic and condescending asshole, but if you would stop being an ignorant doofus, I wouldn't have to be one.

Statements like this make a sweeping assumption: that the fundamental theorems of mathematics are not the formalization of concepts hard-wired into the brain. For instance, the existence of prime numbers wouldn't be obvious to an organism that never used integers. Similarly, it may be possible to discover alien life that never had a use for the Pythagorean Theorem (perhaps they don't perceive space?).

Thus, I believe that your statement is incomplete. Some classes of problems, particularly algorithms, use math by their nature. However, had the discipline branched off of, say, psychology, those classes of problems could be as atrophied as human computer interaction was a few years ago. It is reasonable to assume that CS as a whole would be vastly different. Would architectures resemble the brain? Would they be chemical rather than electrical? Programming languages may be easier to use, but chances are they would lack orthogonality, closure, etc. What would be more entertaining is a computer programmed like Pavlov's Dog...

In an extreme formulation of this idea, certain elements of computer science may not even exist--imagine algorithm development with my latter example. To consider something a bit closer to home, what if the base discipline of computer science was linguistics?

So yeah, I help admin the CPAN, and I'm currently working on upgrading the CPAN packaging tool-chain, in part to help people like you automate the process of generating operating system-specific packages.

And I also kicked off the new Vanilla and Strawberry Perl Win32 Perl distributions and created http://win32.perl.org/

I really think we should talk :)

My browser and other browsers are downloading this exact same page.. look it's parallel programming and no one had to do anything special.

I'm gonna bet there are a lot of groups and developers that completely disagree with that statement. I'm thinking of the Apache Group, MySQL developers, Perl developers, Slashcode developers, Linux developers, etc...

WTF? There has never been a Perl interpreter in Emacs (only Elisp), and Project GNU predates Perl 1.000 by three years.

http://www.gnu.org/gnu/gnu-history.html
http://history.perl.org/PerlTimeline.html#1980s

http://use.perl.org/

PHP is just some hyped, misdesigned, inconsistent, unproductive kinda tool.

Documentation comes with maturity. Many [younger] free software projects move at such a pace (compare the Hagunenon evolution of Mozilla Thunderbird to the rock-steady Microsoft Outlook) that the documentation lags behind a version. Young projects have fewer users, and short intervals between releases with major changes, giving few man hours for the documentation to be updated. It's not yet in the developer's interest to produce complete accurate documentation; many intended features are yet to be introduced while current features are to be changed or removed completely.

Documentation is a target for/after the 1.0 release. A larger userbase of less experienced users demands complete documentation. Developers demand [API] documentation to allow extension. Major releases are rarer, more users have more time to complete documentation, for a stable feature-complete application.

This explains why no other project has documentation superior to perl's at perldoc. Check it out, it's exemplary.
http://perldoc.perl.org/

> Is Python3000 going to rule the day? It's obviously 500 times better than Perl6

Python 3000 is a cleanup of the inevitable evolutionary accretions that languages accumulate. Nothing ground breaking in this release feature-wise. So Python 3000 and Perl 6 are very different in scope. I (as a Python user), for one am very curious of what will come out of Perl 6.

There is a big list at
http://dev.perl.org/perl6/faq.html

The ones I am interested are
explicit strong typing (Python 3000 - optional interfaces)
coroutines (Python 2.5)
macros (debate in Python but bigwigs don't like them)
user-definable operators

Since Perl and Haskell (Pugs) seem to have been dating for a while now, it is curious to see how the shabby blue collar man that is Perl will be transformed by the dainty, complex and academic girl that is Haskell.

Ah, Perl. It's worse than you think.

Just wanted to point out that Nick Ing-Simmons died a while ago, which might be a cause of Perl/Tk's slow progress.

This is PERL. This is Perl. See the difference? Good.

Yesterday, I was on a site with URLs of the form:

http://domain.com/showpage.cgi?/pages/index.html

I wondered if the path was being untainted, so I tried the following:

http://domain.com/showpage.cgi?../../etc/passwd
h ttp://domain.com/showpage.cgi?../../../etc/passwd
http://domain.com/showpage.cgi?../../../../etc/pa sswd
http://domain.com/showpage.cgi?../../../../. ./etc/passwd

Bingo - I had their /etc/passwd file. And then from there, a quick look at their motd gave me the OS, and from their I got the apache configuration.

Then I emailed the site owner, explained the vulnerability and how to fix it (using abs_path and a regular expression to untaint btw).

I can get prosecuted for that? That is so stupid. No more white hatting for me then. Fuck 'em.

I second the bloke who mentioned Catalyst. In one sense it's a url path dispatcher, but it's pretty elegantly done with full debugging support. Sure it's perl, but many people think that's a plus.

Yes, there's lots of "cool" technology that benefits someone somewhere, but how much of it will be useful? Impossible to know, since fads happen in programming just like any other industry: 4GL languages (application/code generators) (see Texas instruments ATI? ATL?), PowerBuilder, etc.

Your work will be your education. Pay attention to the failures you see and ask lots of questions. Of course, if you're an engineer in mindset, you're doing this already.

CODE READABILITY SHOULD BE YOUR PRIMARY OBJECTIVE. One of the biggest challenges I have with working with new grads is that they want to write "optimized" code. YUCK! I end up with unreadable gibberish that executes 2.51% faster. Remember that 50% (yes!) of software cost is in maintenance phase. That means that spending just a little extra effort designing and initially building something simple to understand, diagnose, and modify will save TONS over the life of the program.

Another problem I face is new programmers using the tool they know (like VB) rather than the tool that's optimal for the job. If you don't know Perl (at http://perl.org/), learn it! it is the glue that holds servers and systems together - BUT WRITE HIGHLY READABLE CODE! If there's something easy to do in Perl, it's write obfuscated pieces of *(#&$ that no one can decypher afterwards, including you if you're not careful. A good way to get used to Perl is to browse the CPAN and find something in version 1.001 and look at their self-noted to-do list, fix it, and submit that code up. You gain great experience and the world ends up with better code.

As much as I complain about it, I've found that it really pays to know how to use VBA Excel and Word. Plumbing those apps into other apps can give you godlike status to the business users.

If you want a nice, practial OO language that lets you do lots of stuff, I'm really falling in love with Python. It's fast, it's got a viable OO strategy (as beautiful OO as Perl's OO is ugly), and it's growing fast. If you don't know Python, spend a while and write a quick 1000 lines in it that does something marginally useful.

Just my 5 cents.

I moved to Linux in 1994 as my primary desktop and server OS. About three years ago I decided that I wanted to produce some video content. Video editing was theoretically possible in Linux - I hooked up my camcorder to my Linux box and did some editing, but the tools were primitive and cofiguration was unusually difficult.

Eventually I looked at OS X and iLife. I decided to jump to a Mac. What a great move!

I found that Linux made it possible to do some things, but OS X made it simple to do them.

Fast forward a few years. I now have a few macs at home - their licensing policy makes it affordable to have several machines and a five user license for the OS and tools. My family loves the power and usability of the Mac.

Recently my linux server at home began acting a bit flaky. I did some analysis and determined that hardware replacement was needed. After checking prices for CPU/motherboard/RAM (and potentially hard disk) I figured out that I'd need a few hundred bucks to replace the CentOS box with a new one. After thinking about whether to drop a few hundred bucks or not on this server, it occurred to me that I might be able to move all of the services hosted on linux to OS X.

I found that samba,
  hotwayd,
  dansguardian,
  uw-imapd,
  fetchmail,
  procmail,
  spamassassin,
    rsync,
  rsnapshot,
  apache2,
  MySQL4,
  PHP,
  perl,
  java, and
  squid were all available for OS X.

Most of these are "in the box" with OS X. The only ones that I need to compile from source are uw-imapd and squid! Of course I need the bundled developer tools to get a compiler, and the Apple/BSD startup mechanism and the netinfo wierdness require some tweaks - but since when did Linux *not* require any tweaking?

What this means to me is that after more than a decade of running Linux at home (and work) I am *this* close to shutting down Linux for good at home.

Hope your experience is similar.

Regards,
Anomaly

PS - I share your recent comments about the loss of a pet. :(

During the LWP module install, it asks if you want to install HEAD, GET, POST etc.
But it is a problem for some OS X users head/HEAD

http://use.perl.org/~ct/journal/6556

How do I choose? The money issue is huge, of course, and I think I'd much prefer the Perl job in terms of development preference and work environment. However, I've got the impression that Perl web development doesn't have the future potential in the professional world that .NET has. A search of Dice shows a lot more .NET jobs. Would taking the Perl job hurt my prospects in the future?"

That is because most companies that work with perl don't advertise their positions on DICE. They post their opening on - http://jobs.perl.org/

And let me tell yaou. Perl coders are ALWAYS in demand. The average starting salary is normally from 60k up to 100k depending on skills set (OO perl, mod_perl, etc).

As for myself I would continue working with perl. It's a specialist language that is not going away anytime soon. Currently .NET pays well but that will change since schools are saturating the market with fresh .NET coders (think Java & PHP).

Just my 2 cents.

P.S. Nothing compares to CPAN.

Did you consider some event-driven thing using POE?

A short script involving indent, listing, and latex2html would do the trick. That's more piping than reinventing.

http://backpan.perl.org/authors/id/C/CH/CHTTRAX/ provides listing, which converts C++ or Perl to LaTeX. If you want a solution for other languages, well, no ideas.

To know what Perl 6 will be like, read the Synopses.

My own reaction was more like, wow this guy really is nuts, but I really want to see what he'll manage to come up with. :-) (and I say that as a professional Perl programmer...)

• -> becomes ., like the rest of the world uses.
• The ? : conditional operator becomes ?? !!.

The perl man pages are quite nice to start:

http://perldoc.perl.org/perlboot.html
http://perldoc.perl.org/perlobj.html ...

And here is a very small example using the basic concepts:

{
    package Person ;

    sub hello {
        my ($self,$who) = @_ ;
        print "Hi $who->{Name}! My name is $self->{Name} and I am a " . $self->gender() . ".\n" ;
    }
}

{
    package Man ;
    @ISA = qw(Person);
    sub gender {
        my ($self) = @_ ;
        return "boy" ;
    }
}

{
    package Woman ;
    @ISA = qw(Person);
    sub gender {
        my ($self) = @_ ;
        return "girl" ;
    }
}

my $bob = bless { Name => "Bob" } , "Man" ;
my $alice = bless { Name => "Alice" } , "Woman" ;

$bob->hello($alice) ;
$alice->hello($bob) ;