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Perl 5.8.1 Released
langles writes "Perl 5.8.1 has been released. Read the official announcement,
then download it from a CPAN mirror near you.
If you've been following the Perl5 Porters List, you'll know this version was very well tested before they released it. However, there may be some modules that will need to be fixed before they will work with this release." The announcement also contains full details on incompatibilities and known issues, so give it a once over before upgrading, especially if from a pre-5.8 version.
Seriously, scripting language holy wars are even sillier than other holy wars. I use Perl, Python, and PHP regularly (and both MySQL and PostgreSQL, on both Linux and BSD) choosing whichever seems best for the task at hand. (Yes, I know that I'm very lucky to have a job that allows me to do this.) And as a benefit, I've become pretty good at porting between various combinations of these languages, servers, and platforms. The underlying logic is a hell of a lot more important than the flavor-of-the-month.
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
Heres a thought, why waste your time reading insane gibberish, when there is much more to perl then its obfusication contest. I'm quite sure one could code trash in any lang.
Some code just deserves to be broken ;)
Seriously, scripting language holy wars are even sillier than other holy wars. I use Perl, Python, and PHP regularly
:)
I agree! I'm happy to hear someone else say it. I use both Python and Perl continuously. My code isn't unreadable in either language. Yes, I've had other people work on my Perl code, and I've been able to read my own years later. No problem. OTOH, I'm currently refactoring Java code that is an incomprehensible mess in places. The fact is that the language is not the problem if your code is rubbish.
I was just reading a republished article of Larry Wall's in "Best of the Perl Journal Vol 3". To quote, "Python is like MTV. It rocks, but after a while everything just looks the same". That about sums it up.
Perl's nice. Python's nice. Learn both, you will learn something new and interesting, I guarantee it. Features from each regularly end up in the other anyway, so you'll be ahead of the curve
Um, yes he is, but the language is good anyway. Rejecting Perl because of this is about as stupid as rejecting Sendmail because its author is gay (which, apparently some people in the lunatic fringe have done).
Trust the Computer. The Computer is your friend.
Yes, this is an excellent point. Case in point. Basically, everything can be done in any Turing-complete language (which is something I wish the "But you can do everything in Visual Basic!" sales people would get...).
My feeling is that, when people say something like "This language's code is easier to read", they don't mean as much the language's syntax, as the coding practices that the language's structure encourages.
See "There should be more than one way to do it" as opposed to "There should be one -- and preferably only one -- obvious way to do it", for instance. Different philosophies that fit different languages that fit different coding practices. You'll note that both principles do correlate with the main selling point of their respective language, namely, Perl's ability to be the shortest path from 'nothing' to 'job's done', and Python's knack at remaining damn readable through thousands of lines of code even for programmers not yet involved in the project (among other things).
Down the road it's only a matter of goals, and picking the most appropriate tool to reach that goal. The tricky part, of course, being that 'appropriate' is a relative thing, and sometimes a somewhat unfitting tool is more appropriate in terms of practicality than something you don't yet know and would have to learn from scratch.
Oh, and zealotry is sclerosis of the mind.
-- B.
This sig does in fact not have the property it claims not to have.
This whole list of posts so far is really depressing. At times Slashdot is a great source of information, at times it is just worthless. It all depends on the people posting the comments. Moderators, I know you only have what you are given to work with, but 90% of theses posts are totaly off topic. Larry Wall and the shit in his pants have nothing to do with a new release of Perl. A release that does some pretty damn cool things BTW like making it possible to switch on and off the new signel behaviour with an ENV var.
If anyone wants to know where Perl is going in the future and why it is a damn good lang to stick with, read the O`Reilly book "Perl 6 Essentials" I think a lot of programmers, even some pretty experenced ones confuse syntax that they don't like with "bad" but as has been quoted over and over Perl is about having fun with programming, and being able to make your master work, or being able to dig your own grave. I very well know there are good and bad ways to program in any lang. Even PHP which I tend to dislike, I have to admit most of the reason is because of the nightmare applications that chew on their own tails to such a degree they are next to impossible to figure out. But I know it is possible to do better work in PHP than that. Perl started out in exactly that way with the oh so lovely Matt's script archive Perl 4 type of scripting. But back then it really was *just* a scripting lang. Now it is much more developed. A simple rule of thought that many of you guys need to consider from Aristotle that I here paraphrase; If a man is sitting on a chair and you maintain he is sitting, you are correct. If he gets up, but you still maintain he is sitting, you are incorrect. Sounds like duh huh? But it is the cleanest way I have every heard expressed the idea that if you base your opinons on information that is outdated, then your opinons can be just plain wrong.
Thanks,
Eric
Python 2.3.1 [python.org] final was released this week. Where was the Slashdot story about that one?
And they haven't even got a topic for Python yet... *grumble*.
Slashdot is quite a bit biased towards perl, probably because the engine has been coded in perl. Let's forgive them for that. However, it's a shame that a language that seems so far to be the only free-speech-free-beer language capable of taking on Java and C# gets so little attention.
Will it take a Chandler release for all of you to wake up? Obviously I'm treading the wrong territory here, this being a Perl article an all. By hacking w/ Python, many Perl mongers would be furthering the OSS movement more, not to mention their own careers...
As far as py2.3.1 goes, it's hardly big news, it being just a bugfix release after all.
Save your wrists today - switch to Dvorak
Yeah! He's a Christian, and therefore a lunatic. Clearly Perl's not worth anything because of that. Oh, but he's not only one! Isn't Donald Knuth a Christian? Everybody, take your copies of ``The Art of Computer Programming'' and burn them. Knuth's clearly a nut job!
But let's not stop there! Augustine, Martin Luther, Johann Sebastian Bach, Soren Kirkegaard, Reinhold Niebuhr, Thomas Moore, Dietrich Bonhoffer, John Wesley, Thomas Aquinas, C.S. Lewis, Martin Luther King, J.R.R. Tolkien... all obviously insane. I don't know why we keep printing their works.
(Stupid troll. Made me flame.)
trying to get the meaning of some Perl gibberish
This confirms my solid belief that those who complain about Perl are the ones who do not know Perl.
Those folks who bothered to learn Perl, usually find it readable, easy to maintain, quite robust, and easy to work with.
The fact that it takes a "wild mix" (your words) of other languages to simulate similar behavior should say something about the expressive power of Perl, and the limitations of said in other languages.
"If anything can go wrong, it will." - Murphy
it's called Ruby ;-)