Damian Conway On Programming, Perl And More

Andrew writes: "My host pair.com has an interview with Damian Conway in which he talks a lot about his upcoming modules, and what skills a Perl programmer needs. I'm personally waiting on Parse::FastDescent." Conway talks about some interesting modules he's working on, Perl 6, and on programming in general, too.

Comments

Damian Conway is a prominent Perl programmer, inst

[yatest5]

No, Damian Conway is an extra from Planet of the Apes. What is it with geeks and lame-ass facial hair? Do VDU's stop its proper growth or something - I think we need to be told.

Excellent Perl Resource @ AOL

[Anonymous Coward]

AOL's "AOL Everywhere" project has heavily relied on Perl, they've even set up a forum for developers. Check it out at The AOL Perl Forum.

Not a troll

[pubjames]

Why has this been modded as a troll? What he's saying makes absolute sense.

The fact of the matter is that anyone who is involved in professional web site development will know that Perl is becoming less and less important as a scripting language, I believe precisely because of its design and philosophy.

Unfortuately, "Perl gurus" like to write programs which are as short and "clever" as possible. That type of programming is not compatible with large, professional software development projects.

Of course this opinion will probably be modded as a troll as well by those very same "perl gurus".

Re:Wombat Wookie Wow!

[Anonymous Coward]

Stuff outside car lamp with stove gas? Frog! Frog! Lawn boat, car roof house while steam tree. While soup leak bean, polution redirect without cash. Steve cow then roadkill, what door. God, it hurts my head to type this shit.

Re:You have TROLL BREATH

[Anonymous Coward]

Trolling slashdot about Damian Conway On Programming, Perl And More may be fun, but your oral health should still come first. Bad breath can lead to serious health problems, not to mention monitor damage. Thankfully, you can take use the 20 second formkeys delay to your benefit! Next time you're going for frost pist, take a swig of Listerine and swish it in your mouth... When the stinging becomes unbearable, spit (in a bowl or bucket, not on your computer) and click post - works everytime! You'll get frost pist and have minty fresh breath! Horay for Listerine and the formkeys delay!

Perl is Dying

[Anonymous Coward]

Netcraft has confirmed: Perl is dying Yet another crippling bombshell hit the beleaguered Perl community when recently IDC confirmed that Perl accounts for less than a fraction of 1 percent of all programming languages. Coming on the heels of the latest Netcraft survey which plainly states that Perl has lost more market share, this news serves to reinforce what we've known all along. Perl is collapsing in complete disarray, as further exemplified by failing dead last [samag.com] in the recent Sys Admin comprehensive networking test.

You don't need to be a Kreskin [amdest.com] to predict Perl's future. The hand writing is on the wall: Perl faces a bleak future. In fact there won't be any future at all for Perl because Perl is dying. Things are looking very bad for Perl. As many of us are already aware, Perl continues to lose market share. Red ink flows like a river of blood. FreeBSD is the most endangered of them all, having lost 93% of its core developers.

Let's keep to the facts and look at the numbers.

OpenBSD leader Theo states that there are 7000 users of OpenBSD. How many users of NetBSD are there? Let's see. The number of OpenBSD versus NetBSD posts on Usenet is roughly in ratio of 5 to 1. Therefore there are about 7000/5 = 1400 NetBSD users. BSD/OS posts on Usenet are about half of the volume of NetBSD posts. Therefore there are about 700 users of BSD/OS. A recent article put FreeBSD at about 80 percent of the Perl market. Therefore there are (7000+1400+700)*4 = 36400 FreeBSD users. This is consistent with the number of FreeBSD Usenet posts.

Due to the troubles of Walnut Creek, abysmal sales and so on, FreeBSD went out of business and was taken over by BSDI who sell another troubled OS. Now BSDI is also dead, its corpse turned over to yet another charnel house.

All major surveys show that Perl has steadily declined in market share. Perl is very sick and its long term survival prospects are very dim. If Perl is to survive at all it will be among OS hobbyist dabblers. Perl continues to decay. Nothing short of a miracle could save it at this point in time. For all practical purposes, Perl is dead.

Fact: Perl is dead

Re:Perl is Dying

[Anonymous Coward]

So your whole point that perl is dead is that
it is losing market share? Get Real.

Apache is losing market share. Are they dead? No.

And you are going to be so ignorant to base the number of perl users on Newsgroup Postings!??!
What!? Yeah, Thats accurate.

This IS a troll.

Re:Constant Updates

[Anonymous Coward]

I just want to be the first to tell you how much my asshole hurts. I musta shit a turd the size of Rhode Island this morning. Something I ate made it feel like a ball of glass too, I was suprised I didn't see a pint of blood sinking into the bowl when I looked down past my balls to admire the turd. I'm walking with a limp, but I saved the turd and left it as a present in my boss's coffee cup. I may walk with a limp all morning after squeezing that log out, but my boss will be drinking nutty coffee all week.

yea

[Anonymous Coward]

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Re:Wombat Wookie Wow!

[Anonymous Coward]

At first glance, the parent appears to be incoherent. However, given further thought, one can see the true insight behind an otherwise unintelligible post. It could be an analogy to the arcane structure imposed by Perl; surely my head felt the same way after reading it as it does trying to decipher an uncommented script. Is there a deeper meaning behind this parent, or is it simply a troll short on his medication? We may never know.

Ach du Lieber

[jkujawa]

* For me, Perl syntax hits the sweet spot between too much order (e.g. Pascal, Ada, Python) and too much chaos (e.g. Lisp, APL, Forth). It "fits my brain" better than any other language I've used.
* Perl's TMTOWTDI philosophy extends past its syntax and into its semantics, and that allows me to craft the precise compromise I want between code size, maintainability, efficiency, and complexity.
* Perl lets me to program in a style that suits me, rather than enforcing a style that some language designer thought would be best for me.
* It's an "instant gratification" language. Because Perl provides acceptable execution speed with no separate compilation step, I often find myself developing right in my editor. In fact, I have a key permanently bound to ":!perl -w %" under vi for just that reason.
* It can be quick-and-dirty when I feel the need for speed, but it can also be clean-and-careful when I need robustness. And it can be both in the same program, which lets me prototype new features quickly without compromising the integrity of the existing code.
* Perl is multi-paradigm: I can write code that's procedural, or object-oriented, or functional, or declarative; whatever solves my problem best. I can even mix styles when the optimal solution calls for that.
* Perl's built-in types (i.e. nestable arrays and hashes) cover the vast majority of my needs without requiring me to drag in libraries or jump through memory management hoops.

None of these are good reasons to use Perl. None! These are all reasons that Perl is a maintenance nightmare, and not at all suitable for programs in excess of five hundred lines, or programs that will ever have to be modified.
Even good Perl is some of the worst code I've ever seen.
Just say no.