Interviews: Ask Perl Creator Larry Wall a Question

Larry Wall created the Perl programming language (as well as the Unix utility patch, and the Usenet client rn ). This Christmas saw the release of Perl 6 -- a "sister" language to the original Perl -- that's also free and open source, after 15 years of development. Now Larry has agreed to give some of his time to answer your questions (joking that "I doubt my remarks will be quite as controversial as, say, Donald Trump's, but I suspect I could say an interesting thing or two...")

Larry also gave Slashdot's very first interview back in 2002 -- so it's high time we had him back for more heartfelt and entertaining insights. Ask as many questions as you'd like, but please, one per comment. (And feel free to also leave your suggestions for who Slashdot should interview next.) We'll pick the very best questions -- and forward them on to Larry Wall himself.

Comments

Question

[mlwmohawk]

Why is the syntax of perl so bad? It lends itself to scripts that even the authors can't understand after a week or two.

Re:Question

[Anonymous Coward]

Definitely something in this vein. It may seem like unfair criticism according to some, but Perl's cryptic syntax and control characters make some scripts damn-near unreadable, occasionally even to their own authors. I believe this is damage they are trying to undo with the latest release of Perl but I wonder what decisions led to that seemingly poor design choice.

Re:Question

[invictusvoyd]

Why is the syntax of perl so bad? It lends itself to scripts that even the authors can't understand after a week or two.

Perl and "Rizla fine rolling papers" should have a common tag line :
It's what you make of it

Re:Question

[Anonymous Coward]

i have seen clean perl code , a lot of it . The problem is in the flexibility perl allows which allows some programers to pull tricks which introduce unnecessary complexity .

Re:Question

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, right. Just as C lends itself to it, just look at IOCCC.

You can write shitty perl code, but you can also write beautiful code that is easy to read and maintain since perl is very high level and you don't need to bog down into technical details to solve everyday stuff. Just describe your algorithm and let modules do the heavy lifting (don't reinvent the wheel).

Just because a sysadmin hacks together a five line perl script to fix an acute problem, doesn't mean that all perl code is shitty.

Re:Question

[Anonymous Coward]

Because it's so flexible and allows you to code as well, or as terribly as you'd like.

Unless you're looking at decades old code, there's no excuse for unreadable Perl code except that the author didn't give a fuck.

Unsurprisingly, it's similar for other languages as well. Just the gun you can shoot your foot with is smaller for some of them. Then again, for others, it can be so much larger. C/C++ have ways to inline assembly, for example.

Perhaps the big difference is that Perl is easy to pick up by people without programming experience who then go ahead and use the language in a poor manner. Whereas certain (not all) other languages are hard to pick up, and thus the user already knows better.

Re:Question

[hattable]

WORN code

Write Once Read NEVER!

Re:Question

[Anonymous Coward]

You can write shitty assembly code, but you can also write beautiful assembly code that is easy to read and maintain.

Re:Question

[toonces33]

For years my favorite scripting language was TCL - mainly because the syntax was fairly regular. But few other people used it, and that is why I rarely use it now.

I have always detested perl. Other people write these damned scripts, and I get stuck trying to maintain and/or tweak them. I usually have to start by wasting time doing google searches on obscure operators to try and figure out what the hell the damned thing does.

Re:Question

[Megane]

Because it merged C syntax with sed and awk, which are alien to anybody who has a Windows-only background.

I still don't know where they got the "post-if" conditional variants from, maybe someone made a bet that he couldn't do it.

Re:Question

[bytesex]

It isn't. It does, but it's your own fault.

See how easy it is to answer very subjective questions?

Re: Question

[Anonymous Coward]

Why? Everything is in the manual.

Re: Question

[Anonymous Coward]

And you can write monolithic procedural java code with no OO at all. You can also pick meaningless stupid variable names in most languages.

Re:Question

[Anonymous Coward]

Tcl 'syntax' was a joke. Individual 'functions' (commands) could define their own syntax.

Great tool. Not a programming language though.

Re:Question

[Anonymous Coward]

Then again, for others, it can be so much larger. C/C++ have ways to inline assembly, for example.

1) That is a compiler specific extension. The C standard doesn't define a method to do that.
2) That doesn't lead to unreadable code. That leads to code that has CPU specific segments in it. Sometimes it is necessary, for example when you are writing an operating system.

As for shooting yourself in the foot I wouldn't call it C/C++. The difference between C and C++ in that regard is even larger than the difference between other languages.

Strict ISO-C is very good at preventing you from giving yourself future headaches. Especially if you follow the MISRA guidelines.

Re: Question

[Anonymous Coward]

We found the ONLY Windows 10 user who
Upgraded on purpose boys. Let's all point at him.

Re: Question

[Anonymous Coward]

Linguistics: RunThisProcedure(onThis) if TheEagleHasLanded()

Re:Question

[Anonymous Coward]

Agreed. I've seen people write pretty obfuscated C code which depends heavily on subtleties of the language. If you're not an experienced C developer, it's a real pain in the butt to work with code like that. Of course, there is plenty of what I would call clean C code out there, too.

Re:Question

[budgenator]

Nobody uses TCL now because Microsoft used it as its scripting language in Xenix?

Re:Question

[Anonymous Coward]

Perl borrows a lot of design from Bourne shell, awk, and sed.

Re:Question

[Bob the Super Hamste]

While perl makes it so it is possible to write scripts that are hard for the author to understand I find it better to make my scripts more readable even if they aren't as compact or fast as they otherwise could be. I will say one thing I probably have seen more unreadable, thus unmaintainable, perl code than almost anything else although Java gives it a good run for the money.

Re:Question

[mlwmohawk]

Obviously there is no way to respond to this as "syntax" is a mater of taste. I can say this, though. Java and C type languages clearly delineate "punctuation" and special characters in to well known uses. Secondly, logical flow is wrong in perl, as in, "do_something unless foo" It is a brain dead way of expressing: if( ! foo) do_something. Most languages do not support this type of expression, and switching from java, to c, to python, to (yuck) perl it makes perl especially onerous to read.

Re:Question

[Anonymous Coward]

Java and C type languages clearly delineate "punctuation" and special characters in to well known uses

Are you talking about sigils? e.g. $some_var in Perl vs. std::string some_var_; in a C++ class definition?

Or well-known uses across all languages, such as + always meaning addition... except when it's not, such as string concatenation, or an overloaded operator?

Secondly, logical flow is wrong in perl, as in, "do_something unless foo"

Blame English. I'd describe the lack of support in other languages as a limitation.

Spec: "Do unless "
Perl: "do_something unless some_condition;"

Re:Question

[Anonymous Coward]

Most spoken languages do, and Perl is a linguistic language.

TryAgain() unless closeEnough()

Stop if closeEnough

DoThis() until closeEnough()

Re:Question

[Anonymous Coward]

THIS above what everyone else will say. The problem isn't Perl, or that Perl would allow it. The problem is programmers who are being way too cute and not thinking about usability. It's to the point where I will refuse to even start debugging a program without the use strict an use string pragmas. When I write or edit my own Perl scripts, I make sure to type everything out, because while I could comment confusing syntax, it's much better to let the code speak for itself and add comments where it is important. In general, this is good practice no matter what language you are in. Unless you like riding bicycles with training wheels that never come off.

Re:Question

[Anonymous Coward]

I've seen good and bad code in more than a dozen languages, but that doesn't make all languages equal. Some languages definitely have a higher propensity to various bad habits or just generally bad code. Sometimes this is not so much the code's fault, but more cultural or related to the places the code gets used a lot. E.g. a lot of people use perl for one-liners, which becomes a habit (or about pride) to cram things into a single line to do some small, but not necessarily simple, task. Other languages became popular for beginners and hobby projects that are naturally going to be sloppier, even in very rigid and constrained languages. Nonetheless, when you look at larger, professional projects, you still come across sloppy code more often in some languages than others, and in my experience perl is one such language. You can write clean, organized perl, and I've seen shops with multiple such projects. But for some reason, the conciseness appropriate to a one-liner creeps into larger projects.

Re:Question

[unrtst]

It's to the point where I will refuse to even start debugging a program without the use strict an use string pragmas. When I write or edit my own Perl scripts, I make sure to type everything out ...

Correct me if I'm wrong, but I think you mean "use English" instead of "use string". AFAIK, there is no string pragma.

Re:Question

[Anonymous Coward]

> logical flow is wrong in perl, as in, "do_something unless foo" It is a brain dead way of expressing: if( ! foo) do_something.

Consider:

    if (!() = /[aeiou]/g) >= 3 { next } ;
    if !/(.)\1/ { next };
    if /ab|cd|pq|xy/ { next};

vs

    next if (!() = /[aeiou]/g) >= 3;
    next if !/(.)\1/;
    next if /ab|cd|pq|xy/;

Or:

    if long-complex-conditional----that's-so-long-and-complex-that-you-decide-to-skip-it-for-the-time-being----is-true then blow-rocket-up

vs

    blow-rocket-up if long-complex-conditional----that-you-don't-need-to-understand-to-understand-that-the-rocket-will-blow-up-if-it's-true----is-true

Re:Question

[Anonymous Coward]

Obviously there is no way to respond to this as "syntax" is a mater of taste

Weasel words. You started this thread by saying the syntax was "bad". That's an objective statement against the syntax, which was soundly refuted. Now you're saying it's all a matter of taste anyway? Well which is it?

And now you're saying logical flow is "wrong" - another objective word that you're misusing. Your argument indicates that it's merely confusing (to you), not that it's actually wrong (as in, actually objectively incorrect in some way).

Maybe you should spend your time learning the subtleties of English adjectives.

Re:Question

[david_thornley]

The conditionals aren't wrong, just more varied than you like. You can do "if (!foo) do_something" in Perl. "do_something unless foo;" is optional. Sometimes the additional options can lead to idiomatic phrases. Compare "if (!open file) { die; }" to "open file or die;" and tell me which is easier to read. I'd think that "unless" should mostly be used when the conditional action is almost always executed with some minor exception, and that it could be clearer than the C syntax in that way.

If Perl is difficult to read because of use of non-standard syntax, it's badly written. It is easier to write a bad program in Perl than in Python, but I don't see that as a fault of the language.

Re:Question

[Anonymous Coward]

Larry Wall is a linguist. Many Perl syntax peculiarities arise from this. It tries to match your mental model to some degree, so you don't have to bend your mental model as much.

> "do_something unless foo" It is a brain dead way of expressing: if( ! foo) do_something.

In English, it's fairly common to say, "Do this if that" or "Do this unless that". Perl tries to match this approach, but takes steps to make sure it's less open to abuse. For example, post-conditionals only work on a single statement without braces. There is no "{ foo(); bar(); } unless $baz;". There is also no braceless version of the pre-conditional (traditional) versions. That is, there is no "if ( $baz ) $foo;"

> Most languages do not support this type of expression, and switching from java, to c, to python, to (yuck) perl it makes perl especially onerous to read.

Perl is not like C or Java. You can trick yourself into thinking it's like it, because it can be written in a way that looks like it, but there are very specific concepts at play in Perl (e.g. context) that will bite you if you go in with this assumption.

A Lisp programmer might say "switching from Lisp" to (yuck) Java is especially onerous to read. Or the reverse might happen. Generally people accept they are very different languages that aren't attempting to satisfy the same need, and that their inexperience with the language may be informing their opinion. That Perl looks similar enough to some other procedural languages can often cause this to be overlooked, in my opinion.

Re:Question

[Anonymous Coward]

Sometimes power is exactly what you do not want in a programming language.

While your argument for higher level languages vs. C code in the right context is incontestable, some high level languages encourage the programmer to cut corners and accumulate technical debt, while discouraging long term maintainable code. Sometimes you want your language instead to force your audience (programmers) into a mindset where they have little choice but to produce well structured code bases, even if that costs a bit of learning curve and verbosity it is IMO the better choice.

I haven't seen it plugged here yet, so shameless plug:

    "it's not that perl programmers are idiots, it's that the language rewards
    idiotic behavior in a way that no other language or tool has ever done,
    and on top of it, it punishes conscientiousness and quality craftsmanship
    -- put simply: you can commit any dirty hack in a few minutes in perl,
    but you can't write an elegant, maintainabale program that becomes an
    asset to both you and your employer; you can make something work, but you
    can't really figure out its complete set of failure modes and conditions
    of failure. (how do you tell when a regexp has a false positive match?) "

Quote by Erik Naggum, from the famous perl rant: http://www.schnada.de/grapt/eriknaggum-perlrant.html

One of the more insightful yet enjoyable reads you can find on the subject

Re:Question

[mr_mischief]

There are guidelines for clear Perl code, too.

Re:Question

[mr_mischief]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

Perls before swine

[Anonymous Coward]

Why do you think so few people have adopted Perl as their language of choice?

Re:Perls before swine

[Wycliffe]

I can answer that one: white space defined functions. Seriously, what the hell?

Wrong language. Perl, like C, has no white space restrictions. If I understand your statement correctly, I assume you're thinking of python not perl.

Re:Perls before swine

[Shortguy881]

Lol, I know. I hadn't had my coffee yet and had python on the brain. I couldn't delete the comment though. Feel free to MOD it out of the discussion.

Re:Perls before swine

[shaitand]

You do realize that Perl has massive adoption and that unlike most languages it's usage hasn't dropped over time?

Re:Perls before swine

[arth1]

Perl, like C, has no white space restrictions.

Well, there's the perl format()/write() report functionality, which at one time was a key feature of perl (the r in perl). And I'm not talking about the formatting itself, but that the terminator (.) has to be on column 1 and can't be preceded by whitespace.

Similar for mostly, perl is a well behaved language when it comes to formatting. It does give its users quite a rope lead, though.

Re:Perls before swine

[arth1]

Slashdot perl ate my chevrons.

That should have been:
Similar for <<'SOMETHING' embedded input, where the SOMETHING terminator must be on column 1 and neither preceded nor followed by whitespace. This has broken many a script when well-meaning devs have indented.
Of course, it also allows you to use <<' SOMETHING ' and terminate with a string that starts and ends with spaces, to be really evil...

Re:Perls before swine

[immortalcrab]

Lol, I know. I hadn't had my coffee yet and had python on the brain. I couldn't delete the comment though. Feel free to MOD it out of the discussion.

Yeah like we have points to spare just cause you weren't properly drugged.

Re:Perls before swine

[The-Ixian]

I am a sysadmin type and I decision tree is:

Windows? -> Yes -> Can I use Batch? -> No -> Can I use Perl -> No -> Can I use Cygwin Perl -> No -> Use PowerShell
Linux? -> Yes -> Can I use Bash? -> No -> Use Perl

I can understand the developer h8 (I guess), but for me, Perl is an indispensable language.

Re: Perls before swine

[Anonymous Coward]

Its usage has most definitely dropped over time. I would say Python has taken over most heavy Perl uses: sysadmin stuff too complicated for shell scripts, programming by non-programmers (scientists, amateurs, some webapps.)

Re: Perls before swine

[shaitand]

Usage is actually growing while Python usage shrinks.

http://www.tiobe.com/tiobe_index?page=index

The simple reality is that python doesn't really have much in the way of advantages over Perl. It's true that Perl took a big dip when other languages became trendy and web development moved away but that was actually a boon for Perl developers because the inexperienced children writing unreadable garbage went along with it. Perl has remained the practical champion in it's segment with no real contenders for it's crown.

The upward trend comes because Perl 5 has continued to evolve, any advantages of these upstart languages quickly get absorbed in a coherent Perl way and execution is faster than ever. Perl is starting to become an option for the web again as well with lightweight and extremely fast stacks that both can handle ridiculous numbers of non-blocking connections and have all the mature time tested goodness of Perl behind them. One example is Mojolicious... if you haven't looked at Perl in a few years you probably will barely recognize the code you are writing as Perl.

Re:Perls before swine

[Shortguy881]

Isn't that a mod option? Mine shows: "Inadequately Drugged"

Re: Perls before swine

[Anonymous Coward]

It would help if your linked source didn't show the opposite of what you say. Perl had a couple percent uptick in the last year, but over the last ten years shows a pretty consistent downward trend. Python had a slow growth and then oscillates around a similar level, but has been slowly moving up in relative rankings as other languages dilute further.

This seems consistent with what I've seen at a dozen or so companies I've worked with either directly or through consulting over the last couple years. Perl projects and one-off scripts were still around, but in maintenance mode. Python projects were in active and python was first or second choice for new projects. This was for projects that were monitoring and controlling distributed servers, and tended to have a older, grizzled coder instead of a bunch of kids doing the latest, trendiest things.

Re: Perls before swine

[Anonymous Coward]

I am very interested in the truth about Perl's actual status vs claims folk make. I am skeptical of your perspective but would love to better understand to what degree your experience is relevant and your conclusions valid.

My initial reaction is:

* You don't say whether you (or your company) claim to be Perl coders first and foremost in whatever materials (resume etc.) you present to potential clients. I would expect this to be a determining factor in the nature of the systems your clients have.

* To the degree you do claim Perl as one of your primary languages, your experience will likely be highly salient (albeit anecdotal).

* To the degree you don't claim Perl as one of your primary languages, your experience will likely be largely irrelevant and indistinguishable from confirmation bias. (Why would a client that's serious about Perl pay attention to you or your company let alone agree to hire you at a good enough rate that you accept their offer?)

I would appreciate seeing whatever material you have that potential clients see when deciding whether to directly or indirectly engage you.

Re: Perls before swine

[mr_mischief]

Perl's market share has dropped. Its usage in raw numbers is actually still rising, but not as quickly as that of some other languages.

Perl's place in the world...

[drakaan]

Perl used to be central to so many things (the 'glue' language for the internet), but seems to be slowly falling out of use in deference to javascript, java, python, vbscript/powershell, etc. It's the language I used in my first job as a system administrator (back around the time you gave your first interview), and I loved it.

With so many years between the announcement of Perl 6 and it's completion, many people moved on to other solutions or technologies. Perl 6 is here now, but why should I use it?

Re:Perl's place in the world...

[jellomizer]

I expect much of that is due to the rise of Cheap and Free quality database systems.

Back in the 1990's during Perl's hay day. Database systems were really expensive Thousand of dollars for a bad one, Tens of thousands for a decent one and hundreds of thousands for a good one. Then they were mostly required to run on beefy hardware at the time. Filling up Gigs of storage and using hundred of megs of RAM. Using Perl to process your text/data files made it possible to make these data driven sites run well without such overhead.

Now 20 years later, A low end Computer has the power to run Databases, You can get a really good Database system for under $1k or even Free. Now your data be processed quicker and with more safeguards from data corruption.

Perl was designed for processing text. It did it well... Today we don't need so much of that.

Re:Perl's place in the world...

[hattable]

That was a terrible branding problem. People were expecting perl6 to be the next perl. 5 is still a great glue language, but glue is rarely pretty and people have grown to love their 'beautified' code.

Re:Perl's place in the world...

[shaitand]

Perl 5 usage still outstrips python and usage hasn't decreased at all for sysadmins. Perl usage has dropped for the internet. What some people don't realize is that Perl 5 has continued to be developed. It it much faster and more feature rich than it was in the past. Perl 6 is a new language altogether.

Re:Perl's place in the world...

[drakaan]

Oh, I realize that Perl 5 is still there, and the nature of the schism between the two versions.

I'm really looking forward to Larry (hopefully) responding to "why should I use it?".

Re:Perl's place in the world...

[Bob the Super Hamste]

Perl was designed for processing text.

This is the key. When ever I have to do text processing, configuration file generation, configuration management type stuff Perl is my go to language as it great for processing text. For me it is just another tool in the box, like C/C++, various other scripting languages, etc. it has its place but unlike so many other people I don't just have a hammer so every problem is a nail.

Re:Perl's place in the world...

[Raenex]

Perl 5 usage still outstrips python and usage hasn't decreased at all for sysadmins.

Do you have a source for that?

Perl usage has dropped for the internet.

Oh, I didn't realize that sysadmins weren't part of the Internet.

What some people don't realize is that Perl 5 has continued to be developed. It it much faster and more feature rich than it was in the past.

Too little, too late.

Perl 6 is a new language altogether.

It's got one foot in Perl's legacy, and the other in new, incompatible territory. Just who is Perl 6 going to appeal to?

Re:Perl's place in the world...

[shaitand]

"Do you have a source for that?"

Sure. As you can see usage is actually increasing.

http://www.tiobe.com/tiobe_index?page=index

"Oh, I didn't realize that sysadmins weren't part of the Internet."

Sysadmins actually aren't part of the internet. They are physical humans in the real space not cyberspace. At least for now. The primary internet usage of Perl was coded for CGI. That usage is almost non-existent now. But Perl usage as part of a modern stack is on the rise again even if it is one of the less popular choices it is technically one of the better non-blocking highly parallel solutions able to handle thousands of concurrent connections without breaking a sweat. Actually the concurrent non-blocking thread model that is needed to break 10k connections which is being newly adopted everywhere else was the heart of the now ancient POE system in Perl. There are newer and more shiny solutions like Mojolicious being used these days.

Re:Perl's place in the world...

[h4ck7h3p14n37]

I do sysadmin work (and dev work); started using Perl back in 1996 for Apache CGI's and any shell scripts that were a pain to write using Bourne shell. Perl was great, it basically glued together all of the various Unix power tools like sed, awk, grep, cut, etc.

These days I'm still writing Bourne shell scripts for simple tasks, but I've switched to using Python instead of Perl. The code is much easier to read, there are plenty of third-party libraries available, much better OO support, Python language bindings tend to be better supported than Perl, etc. I'm definitely not missing the leaning toothpicks (yes, I know you can use a different character set, but still), and crazy variable names like $$@array_r.

Pretty much the only thing I prefer Perl for these days is doing pure regexp work. Perl's syntax is just so much better than other languages like C or Python where you have to build an expression, then compile it and finally execute.

Re:Perl's place in the world...

[h4ck7h3p14n37]

But Perl usage as part of a modern stack is on the rise again even if it is one of the less popular choices it is technically one of the better non-blocking highly parallel solutions able to handle thousands of concurrent connections without breaking a sweat.

Why the heck would you choose to write highly-concurrent code in Perl instead of using a language, like Erlang, that was designed for it?

Re:Perl's place in the world...

[shaitand]

Because nobody uses Erlang and you'd be writing something that nobody could step in and maintain after you left?

Re:Perl's place in the world...

[Raenex]

Sure. As you can see usage is actually increasing.

You didn't say usage was increasing. You said: "Perl 5 usage still outstrips python and usage hasn't decreased at all for sysadmins." What your link shows is that Python is ranked 4th and Perl 8th (in that particular list). So you don't have a source and just pulled that statement out of your ass.

Actually the concurrent non-blocking thread model that is needed to break 10k connections which is being newly adopted everywhere else was the heart of the now ancient POE system in Perl.

Who cares? Who wants to use Perl to use that model?

Re:Perl's place in the world...

[skids]

Oh, I didn't realize that sysadmins weren't part of the Internet.

I think GP is talking about highly customized scripts, mostly unpublished, and specific to a particular system or site. You can only discern the prevalence of these uses of a language through the rather imperfect tool of performing surveys -- you can't tell by scraping github or service identifiers.

Re:Perl's place in the world...

[bads]

Because Perl 6 has been designed for highly-concurrent code.

Re:Perl's place in the world...

[Anonymous Coward]

> Perl was designed for processing text. It did it well... Today we don't need so much of that.

Are you aware that current versions of languages like C#, Java, and python haven't properly sorted out level two (codepoints) of the three levels of Unicode?

Re:Perl's place in the world...

[mr_mischief]

It's actually not falling out of use. There are more users than ever. There are more programmers overall than ever, though, and its market share has shrunk as more of the new programmers go to other languages than to Perl.

Just one question

[Anonymous Coward]

Why, Larry, why????

Re:Just one question

[Anonymous Coward]

This. Everything that made Perl good when it came out could have been added to an existing language to much better effect. (Indeed, all Perl's selling points are now available in pretty much every programming language, and most languages are better than Perl as languages.) Larry created a language, badly, when all he really needed were some extra library features.

Re:Just one question

[invictusvoyd]

all Perl's selling points are now available in pretty much every programming language,

There is (was )one of pearls greatest selling points which is still not available in "all" major languages.

CPAN .. mwhahaha!!

Re:Just one question

[Wycliffe]

all Perl's selling points are now available in pretty much every programming language,

There is (was )one of pearls greatest selling points which is still not available in "all" major languages.

  CPAN .. mwhahaha!!

Not only CPAN, but I still find other language's regular expressions severely lacking. Most other languages now have them but they feel like a kludgy tackon and are much more cumbersome and harder to use.

Re:Just one question

[hcs_$reboot]

Come on, Perl was created in 1987 and saved lives of many sysadmins (anything a bit complex with strings manipulation is better done in Perl than in bash..). So, why not?

Re:Just one question

[CrashNBrn]

What othe languages? The tools and languages I use have regular expression as a first class citizen, and usually the PERL version of regex. Although I never saw a need for Perl itself for text transformation, as I learned regex first, then other "languages|tools" (like awk, egrep, AHK) with cleaner syntax to use regex with.

Re:Just one question

[fahrbot-bot]

... all Perl's selling points are now available in pretty much every programming language.

Ya, but I don't want to have to use every other programming language just to get the functionality of Perl. (see what I did there?)

More seriously, different tools for different jobs. Yes, many/most/all of Perl's functionality may be available in other languages, but they are often not as easy to use as in Perl or only available on one platform. One of the projects on which I work is cross-platform on Solaris, RHEL and Windows. I use (more than) several languages (scripting and compiled) to get the job done, but my fallback is almost always Perl (sometimes Java) - especially for something that needs to run identically across all our platforms.

Re:Just one question

[h4ck7h3p14n37]

I'm guessing OP was referencing regex in C and Python. In those language it typically takes you three steps to apply a regex where in Perl you can do it all in one step.

Re:Just one question

[b2gills]

The problem was that the edges of what was possible to do were starting to show, and some of the design decisions were difficult for new Perl programmers to learn.
None of that could be changed without major backward compatibility breakage.

We're talking changes bigger than that of Python 2amp;3.

The main thing I like about Perl 6 is that it has many features from many languages, but manages to combine them in a way that they all seem like they have always belonged together.
How many other languages have a class based regular expression system that doesn't seem tacked on?
I once came across a Python project that attempted to replicate it, but not only was it tacked on, it wasn't even class based as far as I could tell.
( there didn't appear to be a way to subclass a grammar, and the tokens/rules didn't appear to be methods )

And there we have it...

[Anonymous Coward]

The comments above prove the internet is pretty much a total failure that is now mostly populated by assholes who think they are glib, but are really completely unfunny low-IQ douche-nozzles."Enjoy."

Re: And there we have it...

[Anonymous Coward]

And people who like to start arguments with low IQ people.

Re: And there we have it...

[Anonymous Coward]

And people who like to start arguments with low IQ people.

As shown by your low IQ comment.

Re:And there we have it...

[Anonymous Coward]

The Internet was a total piece of shit failure when it started. Today isn't any different.

Re: And there we have it...

[Anonymous Coward]

I remember when slashdot comments were a joy to peruse. What happened, did 4chan move in and never leave ?

Why is Perl so awesome?

[Anonymous Coward]

Why is Perl so awesome?

Killer perl6 application

[Anonymous Coward]

What is the killer application for perl6 and why there is none? Historically, that would be scripting of EDA tools for TCL, scripting of web pages for JavaScript, Rails for Ruby, embedded scripting for LUA, Windows UI for VB, scientific computing for MATLAB, and so on. There is nothing for perl6.

Re: Killer perl6 application

[Anonymous Coward]

-1 for asking what is the killer app and then immediately asking why there isn't one

What's the killer app for java? Bloat?

This is how the world works: some people make things, and they dont need your permission. The platform has to exist before the killer app can be built on it.

When was the last time you invented and shared something awesome?

How do you perceive English predominance in the IT

[Anonymous Coward]

As a linguist, you surely have some thoughts to share on the English language predominance in the IT field (as well as many others). Do you think that it may somewhat shape the way programming languages are designed, as well as IT infrastructures and ultimately our societies, in comparison of what it would be if we would use a no-nation-native language such as Esperanto? By the way, did you know Perligata[1] and Babylscript[2]?

[1] http://www.csse.monash.edu.au/~damian/papers/HTML/Perligata.html/
[2] http://www.babylscript.com/

My question...

[PoopMonkey]

In regards to the syntax; were you drunk/high, or do you just hate people?

Re:My question...

[mr_mischief]

Learn Bash. Then realize that Perl was based on Bash, Awk, C, sed, and BASIC-Plus with some nods to Icon/SNOBOL.

Then you'll understand that Bash's punctuation variables are Perl's punctuation variables. The regex syntax is largely borrowed then built upon.

Basically it's like you're decrying JavaScript or C++ for using curly brackets and semicolons after being built to look familiar to C programmers.

Why has perl6 flopped?

[arth1]

Why has perl6 flopped?
And "I don't think it has" is not a valid answer.

Re:Why has perl6 flopped?

[Anonymous Coward]

I blame Donald Trump

Re:Why has perl6 flopped?

[LordHighExecutioner]

It is software, so it can only flop. If you want something more consistent, try hardware.

Re:Why has perl6 flopped?

[bads]

Asking a question and specifying the answer isn't of course itself a valid question.

Re:Why has perl6 flopped?

[arth1]

Asking a question and specifying the answer isn't of course itself a valid question.

Asking for more than a deflection isn't specifying the answer.

Re:Why has perl6 flopped?

[ajs]

I won't say, "I don't think it has," because it demonstrably has not.

The language has been released in open beta. It still has many properties that I think chase away those who approach it outside of language research communities. As a Perl 5 nostalgia fix, the learning curve is just too daunting, so as the beta progresses, I expect it to continue to build its own base of enthusiasts, the same way Perl did when it was first released.

So the language has not "flopped" yet because it hasn't had a chance to succeed yet.

It took Perl many years to go from a small toy that a trivial number of Usenet enthusiasts had heard of to a standard part of the Unix and Unix-like toolset. I don't think Perl 6 will gain traction any faster, especially given the learning curve. That's not flopping.

However, it has some substantial advantages over other languages. High on that list is the trivial nature of slinging highly functional grammars as first-class objects. That's something that you just can't do as easily in any other language that I know of. Perl 5 parsers and those of many other high level languages have some pretty severe performance penalties; yacc and its kin aren't dynamic enough; the various parser generators for Java are fast and mostly complete, but really painful to use.

Basically, you need a language that closely integrates grammars with the language itself in order gain the benefits of Perl 6. Here's and example parser I posted to reddit the other day:

https://www.reddit.com/r/perl6...

A few other notable things that I think will draw people in:

The generalization of operators over iterable sequences and the hyper-operator version of reduction are features that you're going to hear a lot more about, I suspect. Perhaps in Perl 6, perhaps in other languages that adopt these ideas. I'm especially stunned by the utility of hyper-method-invocation (foo>>.method) which dispatches a given method over any iterable sequence of objects (whether they are the same type or not).

Full macros have not yet landed, not least because we've never had a full understanding of what macros would be. We know that they need to operate on the ASTs that represent code, and all of the self-hosting properties necessary to support that are there, but the exact syntax and semantics that are most Perl-friendly haven't fully gelled, yet. Once they do, I think that every language to have true macros in the past (mostly Lisp variants) has demonstrated the power of this tool.

A few other languages auto-generate accessors for classes, but I find the way Perl 6 does it to be a substantial improvement on the field, and it really is a joy to use. I think others will feel the same.

Speaking of objects, role composition will take some time for people to get used to, but as in other languages that have had similar features, I think this will be critical to Perl 6's adoption.

There are dozens of smaller features that are just quality-of-life benefits ranging from lexical variable/named parameter passing to the way any block can be turned into an anonymous closure and even curried. Some of these will be important to some, but not to others. It will be interesting to see it play out.

Re:Why has perl6 flopped?

[ajs]

Strange, I could have sworn that I replied to this with a very detailed and lengthy response... urg.

Anyway, upshot is this: Perl 6 hasn't yet had a chance to flop. It was released in beta in December of last year and continues to make steady progress. Users are checking it out slowly, but I don't expect a landslide migration. P6 will have to prove itself as a language.

Re:Why has perl6 flopped?

[bads]

Why should anyone care what you think is a "deflection" or not?

Just one more question...

[Anonymous Coward]

Why did you decide to use prefixes to indicate the type of a variable ($@%)?
This is by far the most confusing thing about perl to me.
Other than that I think it's a nice scripting language with a better interface for calling external programs than python for instance.
Or at least one that's easier to use.

Re:Just one more question...

[linuxrocks123]

I think the answer to that is inheritance from Bourne Shell.

Re:Just one more question...

[CrashNBrn]

If variable prefixing variable types with $@% is true, why not an extension to Perl to use readable variable types?

Re:Just one more question...

[fahrbot-bot]

Why did you decide to use prefixes to indicate the type of a variable ($@%)?

I think the answer to that is inheritance from Bourne Shell.

Perl pre-dates Bash by a few years, but certainly Sh or Ksh. But, other than pre-declaring variables to be a specific type, using delimiters serves that purpose, serves as syntactic sugar for the interpreter and allows variable name overloading (though I'm not a big fan of this use). Personally, I've *never* had a problem with the variable-type indicators and cannot really imagine how someone would.

Re:Just one more question...

[narcc]

Why did you decide to use prefixes to indicate the type of a variable ($@%)?

Isn't it obvious? It was to make the interpreter easier to write!

Re:Just one more question...

[Anonymous Coward]

He said the Bourne Shell (which is "sh"), not Bash. The Bourne shell was created in 1977, ten years before Perl.

Re:Just one more question...

[tnk1]

"sh" IS the Bourne shell. "Bash" is the "Bourne Again Shell", a nicer backwards compatible follow-on to be sure, but not the original. And the Bourne shell does predate perl. Bourne shell is indeed where perl gets much, if not most, of its odd syntax.

That's why it had high sysadmin adoption. You can pretty much turn a shell script into a perl script with very little work, and then expand from there. All the cryptic syntax is actually very familiar to shell scripters. It's just that your OO language developers are those who were wont to go from languages like C/C++ and Pascal to Java and then further on to all the various follow-ons, and they didn't really hang out much with the shell. You can still see this today when I still have to teach an experienced developer how to run his own application on a Linux box.

Re:Just one more question...

[tnk1]

Hacks to create non-symbolic types do exist, but honestly, anyone who bothers with perl for long enough just gets used to them.

And it's not really all that hard. I actually never really understood why people found them to be all that confusing. $ is a scalar, @ is a list or array, and % is an associative array or hash. Yes, they can be used in some odd ways, and that's annoying to learn, but once you figured it out, perl is just fine.

I mean sure, typing out "Integer myInteger" is nice and all, but perl isn't a strongly typed language, so what would that do other than make me write out a word that doesn't really say more than that dollar sign did. In perl, casting a scalar as an integer can happen, but you can also use that same scalar as a string, so you might as well call it '$'.

The problem with perl was that you would have a lot of trouble making objects out of perl when OO is/was all the rage. And yeah, some of the built-in variables like your $$ and your $ and all of that required a cheat sheet to know which ones they were, but it really wasn't that bad.

I do agree that you do need to do a little staring at someone's perl code to figure it out sometimes, but at least it doesn't take as long to read as the verbosity of some languages which use multicharacter words to describe what could be described in one character.

Although I really have been working to adopt other languages to stay current, the fact is that if I want to do something, I can actually still do it in perl and have to force myself not to, most of the time. Most of that is CPAN remaining really strong and providing interfaces. The language itself is just a language, and I learned it long ago, so as long as people write drivers/interfaces for it, the oddities of perl have long been a non-existent problem for me.

Re:Just one more question...

[truckaxle]

I seriously would like to know why you find this confusing. It is a form of cheap Hungarian Notation or intrinsic documentation. With the cost of one character I know the type of a variable. It is the one thing I find (contrary to the prevailing opinions) that makes Perl very readable.

Re:Just one more question...

[fahrbot-bot]

"sh" IS the Bourne shell. "Bash" is the "Bourne Again Shell"

Ya, I actually know that. I had just read a post about Bash and mixed it up in my brain with yours - sorry. Either not enough or too much coffee today.

Re:Just one more question...

[Anonymous Coward]

I guess most newbies are confused by the way %hash changes to $hash when you access a key from it.

The answer has got something to do with scalar/list context, but I can't really explain 'why', even after a good chunk of Perl experience.

The $ sigil implies scalar. It's kind of odd how the sigil switches to @ for hash slices (list context) though: @hash{'foo', 'bar'} = ('baz', 'quux');

Re:Just one more question...

[Anonymous Coward]

Perl 6 drops that:

        my %hash;
        %hash{'key'} = 'value';

Re:Just one more question...

[CrashNBrn]

Interesting Thanks.

Re:Just one more question...

[mr_mischief]

This was done up through Perl5 because the sigil is for what you're getting back from the expression rather than how it was originally stored. It's something Perl6 changes -- you access a hash with % or an array with @ even if you're just taking one item from it.

Perl and Social Justice.

[Anonymous Coward]

The latest development in the field of programming languages has been integrated support for Social Justice.

For example, the new Rust programming language has a very extensive Code of Conduct, enforced by the Rust Moderation Team.

Codes of Conducts and Moderation Teams are essential to ensure that a programming language properly supports Safe Spaces, Tolerance, and the other core tenets of Social Justice.

Larry, why is it taking so long for Perl 5 and Perl 6 to support Social Justice to the level that the Rust programming language does?

Re:Perl and Social Justice.

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm for this. We need Perl to automatically replace the word "black" with "basketball American"

Re:Perl and Social Justice.

[mwvdlee]

From the front page of Perl 6's site perl6.org:

The only requirement is that you know how to be nice to all kinds of people.

Isn't hat social justic enough for you? Linus may get flak for his "social" interactions, but it gets the point across and the job done.
I'd much rather have a correct dickhead over an incorrect nice guy when it comes to doing things that people need to be able to depend on.

Re:Perl and Social Justice.

[110010001000]

That isn't enough. It says "all kinds of people". What about individuals who identify as non-people (like furries)? Report to the nearest SJW reeducation camp!

Re:Perl and Social Justice.

[CaptnCrud]

You can do things right without being a douche nuckle, to me there is no excuse for either.

Re:Perl and Social Justice.

[Anonymous Coward]

And that's what makes you a douche knuckle.

Re:Perl and Social Justice.

[Anonymous Coward]

Please do not use the "f"-word. It is inappropriate. The correct term is "otherkin".

I know this because I use Rust and as a Rust user it's important to use non-offensive terms at all times, in all cases, without exception. I do not want to get on the wrong side of the all-powerful Rust Moderation Team.

Re:Perl and Social Justice.

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm for this. We need Perl to automatically replace the word "black" with "basketball American"

You have a very un-healthy preoccupation with race, my friend.

Re:Perl and Social Justice.

[CaptnCrud]

silent k's are over rated.

Re: Perl and Social Justice.

[Anonymous Coward]

And you don't have enough sense of humor. Anal Annie over here.

Re:Perl and Social Justice.

[skids]

I lurk the IRC channel. There were some motions to start working on this. They got as far as a gist which seems to have now disappeared. As a "troll hugging" culture that aims to actually teach people with less social graces to grow up a bit, Perl 6 has to write its own that is more likely to doll out lots of wrist-slaps at first rather than shooting first and wondering why everyone left the community later.

Regrets and hopes for the future

[Anonymous Coward]

What are your biggest regrets regarding Perl: is there anything significant you'd like to have done otherwise during the development of the language?

Do you think Perl still suits well modern application development methods?

Re: Regrets and hopes for the future

[Anonymous Coward]

Perl6 is the answer to this question for perl5. Corrects lots of mistakes.

Modern development methods apply to perl6 like any other high level language. Plan your project, test your code, document what is not obvious, use an IDE, etc etc.

Did you ask the same question about apples swift? Pretty much the same answers.

Re:Just one question...

[Anonymous Coward]

I think it probably has the opposite effect unfortunately

Python . . . ?

[PolygamousRanchKid]

What do you think about Python . . . ?

Re:Python . . . ?

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't like snakes

Re:Python . . . ?

[Big Hairy Ian]

What do you think about Python . . . ?

We've already got one! now go away or I shall taunt you again!!

Re:Just one question...

[invictusvoyd]

Can Perl prevent shootings?

Force the NRA folks to learn it and write an OS in it .

what do you think about the perl guy?

[allo]

Perl is proven to be fundamentally broken. Here are two very entertaining videos about how to exploit weird array casting, hashes and so on.
I really think every perl programmer should have seen it.

https://media.ccc.de/v/31c3_-_...
https://media.ccc.de/v/32c3-71...

What do you say about this criticism and the exploited flaws?

Re:what do you think about the perl guy?

[Anonymous Coward]

"Perrrrrl. And Waiii doooo i heffff this outrageous accent?"

Re:what do you think about the perl guy?

[Anonymous Coward]

You posting those proves you know ZERO about Perl.

Re:what do you think about the perl guy?

[alantus]

I saw the first video, and I'm sure this Netanel Rubin will be ashamed of his presentation sooner or later due to the childish insolence.

Perl is not broken, there is code out there with vulnerabilities, it happens in all languages.

Re:what do you think about the perl guy?

[allo]

Let me guess, you're a fan of perl?

Just listen to the guy. Don't take him too serious, it's a rant and he presents it in a funny way. He has a point, which is proven via a bugzilla hack. But this doesn't really mean "stop using perl". Okay, maybe it does ... ;-)

And a comment by Larry Wall would be interesting.

Re:what do you think about the perl guy?

[allo]

btw. that he's not a beginner to perl or a real hater is clear, as he has so much experience with the internal fuckups. you don't know this, if you're only tested it and thought too many cryptic characters. He must have been a power user.

Re:what do you think about the perl guy?

[Anonymous Coward]

If you watch the videos, there are certainly things that may be classified as somewhat misleading in what he says - and his form of humor might not be everybody's cup of tea. And one or two things he criticizes for being illogical do reasonable to me.

However, he does make a very valid point: Perl 5 makes it really, really hard to write code where you are able to fully understand all the ramifications. This is so bad that even the documentation of commonly used modules (even if they are now deprecated) contain examples that are huge security problems due to all of these subtleties.

Now of course, you can say that a lot of people just don't write good Perl code, but that's missing the point here: obviously you can write secure Perl code, just as you can write secure PHP3 code with register_globals on. The problem in both cases is that it's really hard do to so properly, and you have to really be on your toes - and because it's so hard, nearly nobody is able to actually do so in practice. There's a reason why this guy was able to find these easy to exploit bugs in widely-used decades-old code that so many people will have at least casually looked over.

The main problem I see here is that if you look at what happened with other languages, the criticism was actually taken seriously, even by developers using the language. While there are still a lot of weird historical quirks in PHP you can make fun of, and there still are enough things to criticize, it's actually not that hard anymore to write good code in the current PHP version - because the language developers dropped a lot of the stuff that caused all these headaches. And there has been an awareness among many developers to be wary of some of earlier PHP versions' features (such as register_globals) - because there is a recognition that those were detrimental to security. If I look at the reactions to this guy's talks, what I saw was mostly ridicule, and Perl5 fans arguing that this guy doesn't understand perl and nit picking some of the things he said, without getting the broader point he was trying to make. So unfortunately, there appears to be very little awareness with Perl5 fans how difficult it actually is to write secure code with Perl5. And your response here ("know ZERO about Perl") just proves precisely this.

Now, I'm not making any statement about whether this type of criticism has reached the people designing the language. I haven't looked at Perl6 in detail (and I won't see the need to until/if it steps out of its current tiny niche), so it could well be that precisely these things have all been improved there. Or it could have remained the same. Or could have gone in the other direction. Precisely for this reason it would be great to get an answer from Larry Wall about this specific criticism, especially how it relates to Perl6.

Re:what do you think about the perl guy?

[Anonymous Coward]

Thanks, those were wonderful. I used to program in Perl a lot when I was still in university, mostly because it was heavily pushed by the professors, but also because it allowed me to quickly slap stuff together. So as a bit of a Perl enthusiast I really enjoyed the two talks. I also liked the speaker's presentation: clear, structured and with a bit of humour. I was laughing the entire time, despite the gravity of the thing... Oh, did I say ‘Perl enthusiast’? Yesterday, I was. Now, no longer. So again, thanks, if not for your post I'd never have seen these talks.

Re:what do you think about the perl guy?

[hcs_$reboot]

Hard to understand if you don't speak German!

Re:what do you think about the perl guy?

[hcs_$reboot]

In PHP you have more terrible things, the ?: ternary operator associativity for starters, associative arrays, etc... and yet it's one of the most popular languages

Re:what do you think about the perl guy?

[Anonymous Coward]

Do you know a way to turn of the german language sound track in the second video?

Re:what do you think about the perl guy?

[Anonymous Coward]

To get english soundtrack on the second video, click on the * at the video status bar and then choose english

Re:what do you think about the perl guy?

[OverlordQ]

> What do you say about this criticism and the exploited flaws?

None of those have anything to do with Perl the language.

Re:what do you think about the perl guy?

[Anonymous Coward]

The problem though is that in this case the programming language itself fostered the vulnerabilities. I don't think even a team of reasonably competent, experienced Perl programmers could have avoided these bugs within a sensible time frame. Indeed, the code looked perfectly fine, everything was in line with how things are generally done within the Perl ‘community’, there were no red flags, and indeed old well-aged venerable software like Bugzilla was exploitable. Furthermore, I think the reaction of the ‘community’ is akin to wearing a blindfold because you have to walk across a minefield.

I'm reminded of this PHP bug and the reaction of the PHP ‘community’. Even now, in 2016, nothing has been done about this in the PHP language, and even the documentation of the foreach construct hasn't been updated. It should have a really prominent warning, not as a footnote, but high up in the documentation where at least the people who look up the documentation for basic language constructs might see it, but... nothing. And this is for a problem that surfaced in 2014!

Re:what do you think about the perl guy?

[fahrbot-bot]

You call those flaws, others may call them features. I didn't watch the videos, but you can do really weird things in other languages, like C and, yes, some are problems, but they can often be useful for legitimate code. Perhaps you just haven't run across coding situations that require this type of language "flexibility".

Re:what do you think about the perl guy?

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually they did. All of the exploits were caused by the behaviour of the Perl language itself, which is so perverse that even seasoned Perl developers don't know how perverse it is. All of the exploited code would have passed peer review in pretty much every company. If code doesn't do what developers think its does, you have got a problem with the language and sticking your head in the sand isn't going to improve the situation. I urge you to watch both talks again, and to pay attention this time.

Re:what do you think about the perl guy?

[tnk1]

Which is why perl was not adopted instead of java or C++ for certain tasks.

I agree that perl5 would make it a pain in the ass to write a fully featured application in, but perl itself does not cause these issues. At worst, it confuses some people into not doing proper validations. Or they're just lazy and didn't do them.

But considering everything that was written in perl, and everything today written in other languages that seems to be just as vulnerable to various attacks, I don't really see these examples as being more than someone who coded in perl who didn't understand how to write an application securely with it. You get the same thing with just about any language.

Re:what do you think about the perl guy?

[Anonymous Coward]

He has a point, which is proven via a bugzilla hack.

I didn't view the video, but is that the 'people can use list context to disable database quoting in bind_columns' flaw?

How should I put it. List context is a fundamental feature of Perl. It's curious that two modules interacting (plus an unaware programmer) lead to such a security issue. (Those things are documented in the modules' perldocs, aren't they?)

But it doesn't prove nor make Perl 'fundamentally broken', as you put it.

Here are two very entertaining videos

Interspersing your slides with image macros does not make your presentation funny, I'm afraid.

(I'm not the grandparent AC.)

Re:what do you think about the perl guy?

[Anonymous Coward]

Anyway, I take a bit of offence to this slide:

https://i.imgur.com/im1tjbT.jpg

The 'actual' column is pretty basic Perl semantics: Arrays flatten like that when in list context. Subroutine argument lists are (surprise) list context. This is oftentimes extremely handy [1]. The 'expected' column only makes sense if you're coming from an everything-is-an-object language such as Ruby or Python.

(FWIW, with Ruby you can use the 'splat' operator (*array) to flatten arrays when you call a subroutine.)

[1] Extremely handy: foreach ('foo', 'bar', @other_stuff) { ... }

Re:what do you think about the perl guy?

[Anonymous Coward]

‘I didn't watch the videos’ – Then why did you think you had anything sensible to say on the topic? Go watch them now, both, and come back when you're done.
It might be called a feature if you can do something weird if you want. But Perl can do weird things when you definitely don't want it do, in cases where even experienced Perl developers cannot foresee it. Then, it's no longer a feature, but a flaw.

Re:what do you think about the perl guy?

[Coryoth]

Well it's a combination of the automatic array flattening, and the fact that perl subroutines take an arbitrary number of arguments and just shift them off the list, allowing you to "overwrite" expected arguments with the flattened list -- ideally you might hope for an error with "too many arguments to function foo". The end result is that as long as you can force things to be arrays (or lists) when people don't necessarily expect that (like, say, the cgi module handling mutiple parameter definitions) you can get up to some serious funny business.

Re:what do you think about the perl guy?

[Anonymous Coward]

‘Which is why perl was not adopted instead of java or C++ for certain tasks.’ – If only. The problem is that Perl was used for tasks where it becomes a very dangerous language to use, like implementing a web bug tracker. You say other languages are just as insecure, but that simply isn't true, I've never seen language-level bugs of this magnitude, not even in PHP and that's saying something. It's bad enough having to deal with your own bugs, having to deal with bugs that shipped ready-made with the language itself is a nightmare, especially since it isn't clear whether they can be reliably worked around in all cases, and the workarounds that there are are very onerous.

Re:what do you think about the perl guy?

[b2gills]

I saw the first one, it was hilarious how many mistakes he made.
He thinks that @list is a list, what a newb.
There was one slide that had like 5 errors on it, if I liked cringe humor I would have been laughing my ass off.

Re:what do you think about the perl guy?

[b2gills]

And yet it had absolutely nothing to do with Perl 6, none of the things he pointed out work that way in the new sister language.

Re:what do you think about the perl guy?

[b2gills]

They aren't bugs in the language they are design decisions made in very early versions of the language, back when it was basically just a combination of sed awk sh and C.
None of those languages has lists of lists, not like modern languages anyway.
It wasn't until Perl 5 that arrays of arrays without using symbolic references was possible, and that came out before the first version of Java in 1994 (It had features even back then that Java didn't, like closures and lambdas).
I find it amazing just how capable it can be and still maintain over 90% compatibility all the way back to Perl 1 from 1987.
I mean there is probably a bigger difference between Perl 5 of 10 years ago, and that of today, than between Python 2&3, but upgrading Perl isn't that big of a deal.

As to calling subroutines or methods inside of a key value argument list, I thought everybody knew that you have to either put scalar in front of it, or do something else to make sure it doesn't clobber the rest of your arguments, like put it in an anonymous array ref.

Also any argument about Perl 5 coming from someone who thinks that @list is a list should be taken with a grain of salt.
I mean I think that was literally the only time I have ever seen a Perl 5 array named @list. ( other than right here of course )

Re:what do you think about the perl guy?

[Anonymous Coward]

> He has a point, which is proven via a bugzilla hack.

A couple hours after Netanel first filed his "critical vulnerability report" bugzilla's devs replied that he had not uncovered a security bug. Over the next 6 hours Netanel continued to argue that he had. 20 minutes after Netanel's last comment he was asked to do a simple test that would demonstrate that he was wrong. He never replied.

One has to read the bug report carefully to understand the particular combination of logical errors he'd made but the gist of it is that he misunderstood the role of a security checking mechanism called "taint mode" and misinterpreted some results from failed attempts to hack a bugzilla instance, thinking he had actually hacked it when he had not.

In his presentation a few weeks later Netanel continued to be sure he was right and convinced a huge audience, including you I guess, that he was right and had found a critical vulnerability that "shattered the security of most Perl CGI projects in the world". He had not.

Re:what do you think about the perl guy?

[Anonymous Coward]

Um, he did reply? And the Bugzilla developers did implement a fix.
In my opinion, the way the Perl ‘community’, exemplified by people like you, tends to stick its head in the sand and vilify every critical sound as heresy, is much, much worse than the actual technical problem. As they say, there are known unknowns and unknown unknowns. A language bug, when discovered, is a known unknown. It's irritating, but as a Perl hacker with quite some experience I can deal with that. But to think that people like this give the advice you get on Perl fora, make Perl design decisions, code Perl packages and write Perl documentation, and that this attitude pervades the whole language ‘community’, that just makes me shudder.

Re:what do you think about the perl guy?

[allo]

Of course, they fixed it. Should they have left it open?

> In my opinion, the way the Perl ‘community’, exemplified by people like you
two ad hominem at once. First "the perl community", as if it were a homogenous mass, then "people like you".

> It's irritating, but as a Perl hacker with quite some experience I can deal with that.
I do not doubt this. And i guess you can take the "STOP USING PERL" with a grain of salt.
But it's like other programming languages, there are some paradigma, which make it hard to make mistakes and others, which make it hard to avoid common pitfalls.

> people like this
You're doing it again.

Re:what do you think about the perl guy?

[david_thornley]

Does Perl usage in general have much to do with Perl 6? Perl 5 just kept getting better and better, and I've been away from the community for a while.

Re:what do you think about the perl guy?

[Anonymous Coward]

I agree Netanel makes great points about nonsense in Perl, both real and imagined, in a hilarious way. What I objected to was Netanel's misrepresentation of the bugzilla "bug" in his Camel Strikes Back presentation given that this is what he was actually talking about:

Netanel: "I tested the vulnerability specifically on [BMO] and it worked, allowing me to dump the content of the entire DB".

Frédéric: (to Netanel) "do you actually get the data back? Or do you just see a 200 OK response?"

Netanel: "200...

Byron: "i see an intermittent http/200, however it always has content-length of 0"

Frédéric: (to Netanel) "Well, this makes a big difference. Not getting the data back and not being able to alter the data is much less worse than getting the DB dump you mentioned earlier."

Netanel could/should have written "well, I did get data" if he actually did. But he doesn't. Because, contrary to what he thought he saw, he could not have gotten any data because tainted mode was always on for the BMO instances exactly as mandated for all bugzilla instances. So, while I will grant that "allowing me to dump the content of the entire DB" wasn't a lie, I trust you will grant that it was at least unfortunate wording given that he couldn't and didn't get a single byte.

Or, to put it how Netanel would put it, WAT.

Up to this point Netanel has been tricking himself into thinking he's right by drawing incorrect inferences from his experiments. Now he switches to tricking himself without even bothering to test his hypothesis:

Netanel: "... making this a blind SQLI. ... I could have easily extracted ... critical info. ... I haven't tried doing it myself, as I don't want to breach anyone's privacy".

20 minutes later, Frederic links to two bugzilla instances so that Netanel can actually test his blind sql injection attack hypothesis to settle the issue.

Netanel never replies or comments further in the bug report.

WAT

In wrapping up this first phase of the bug report, Byron Jones writes "this problem does _not_ exist on bmo - it is always caught by taint checks so even though you can inject conditions into the sql, they are never executed by the database. it's still a problem that we should address, but it isn't a critical security issue." and Frederic concludes: "Per the investigation above, this is not a security bug."

Finally, during his Camel Strikes Back presentation a few weeks later, Netanel implicitly acknowledges that the above so-called bugzilla vulnerability is theoretical rather than actual when he answers "No" to the question "Does your exploit also work in tainted mode?". Given that it was crystal clear by then that BMO instances, like other correctly installed bugzilla instances, have always had tainted mode on, as mandated by bugzilla.org (and more generally as recommended for server programs by perl.org in the first paragraph of the security section of the official perl docs), his talk of discovering a 5 year old bugzilla bug was, imo, just as misleading as his initial entirely false "dump the content of the entire DB" claim.

Re:what do you think about the perl guy?

[Anonymous Coward]

I watched the first video.

It was a young arrogant kid spouting a lot of profanity and being shocked at how lists work in perl.
Then he paraded out some code in bugzilla that had a vulnerability involving lists and hashes.
Then he showed some poorly written code of his own that used DBI in a pretty stupid way, specifically allowing user input into the query and acted shocked that it was vulnerable to a SQL injection attack.

The take away? Using a lot of vulgar language makes it funny when you think one language should act like some other language, but it doesn't. It somehow makes the language wrong and you funny.

Or, it makes the language different and you look like a middle school clown.

Re:what do you think about the perl guy?

[Anonymous Coward]

The hate comments here are the best part of the whole thing.

Re:How do you perceive English predominance in the

[houghi]

I think there is. At least the influence of language is there. e.g. for many a search down is done with / and a search up with ? and for people who use a qwerty this is pretty obvious, as it is on the same key. The / is at the bottom and the ? is at the top.
So you have a key that means search and you can go up or down according to what is shown on the key.

If you work with a different keyboard, this becomes less obvious. on azerty-BE they are not on the same key and both are on the top, so there is no link to know why it is done that way. And understanding is always nice.

And that was just an example. Using [] means I need to use the right ALT key. Same for tick and back tick. or {}. This is not unpossible, but it is a LOT easier to do on a querty.

What I imagine has happened is that they start programming a language, look at the keyboard and think "What is the best key to use here?" and then take one that has not yet been used and which one can be accessed easily? On a different keyboard the result would have been different. e.g. a search could have been as they are not only on the same key, but even point to where you are going.

Perl

[Anonymous Coward]

Why does the Camelia butterfly look like a bad acid trip?

Do you believe, as we do, that God has a plan for us all?

Do you believe that gay marriage is an abomination?

Who is Perl voting for in the presidential election this year?

Will the real Larry Wall please stand up?

Re: Perl

[Anonymous Coward]

Please separate your questions into different posts so they may be assessed individually.

Why perl?

[Anonymous Coward]

Why would you encourage someone to learn perl? (Compared to other programming languages, feel free to just give a general "reason" for perl, or an actual comparison).

My question to Larry Wall.

[Anonymous Coward]

Why?

if u combine ur last name with larry page's

[Anonymous Coward]

u get paul (phonetically).

r u a ron Paul support?

When are you going to develop the next JPL ?

[Anonymous Coward]

When are you going to develop the next generation of Java Perl Lingo (JPL) ?

http://www.perl.com/pub/1998/12/jpl-announce.html

Re:I want to know

[Hognoxious]

And where can we get some?

Esteemed Individuals

[JohnDeHope3]

It seems like a lot of industries have "esteemed individuals" who are given the benefit of the doubt. Priests, rabbis, imams, tenured professors, elite actors and directors, etc. Maybe in technology we have people like Larry Wall, David Heinemeier Hansson, Douglas Crockford, Paul Graham, etc. What are your thoughts on this?

I like having the feeling of esteem. It warms my heart when I think about what I've learned reading Fred Brooks, Seth Godin, Donald Knuth, etc. I hold you all in revence. I don't think this is such a bad thing. Would I blindly follow whatever any you say? No, of course not. But wisdom is wisdom, and experience is experience, and those of you who have it, and have had it, and have written to me about it, are very much appreciated and held in high esteem. I think this is all very good and healthy and perfetly natural. Thank you!

Who's using Perl?

[quentindemetz]

Which large companies are still using Perl in production? I can name Booking.com, but do you know any others?

Re:Who's using Perl?

[shaitand]

Every large company that still uses *nix in production which is most of them.

Re:Who's using Perl?

[Anonymous Coward]

"in production" meaning directly delivering the business' product, not one of the thousands of indirect/ancillary infrastructure tools

Re:Who's using Perl?

[bheerssen]

CPanel uses perl in its flagship product. Maybe it's not a huge company (and it's not) but it does supply software to a lot of web hosting companies.

Re:Who's using Perl?

[Anonymous Coward]

also craiglist.org is written in Perl

Re: Who's using Perl?

[Anonymous Coward]

No, "in production" means anywhere that is part of the company activities other than research/development. All those mail gateways and backend scripts and infrastructure stuff? Production. Automated build system in the development servers? Production. How can you tell? Shut it down and see if anyone complains that something is not working.

Re:Who's using Perl?

[Anonymous Coward]

Bosch

Re:Who's using Perl?

[destinyland]

DuckDuckGo, Ticketmaster, Priceline, Craigslist, IMDB, LiveJournal and......Slashdot.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

Re: Who's using Perl?

[Anonymous Coward]

If that's your standard, then straight Bourne Shell (or bash) and DOS batch files are software industry heavyweights. Surely the amount of code and its functionality should carry most of the weight in this language ranking, not just if you can point to some little script that glues together the software packages written in not-perl that do 99.9% of the work.

Re:Who's using Perl?

[Anonymous Coward]

Amazon.

Re:Who's using Perl?

[Anonymous Coward]

All of them. Seriously.

I'll show some respect

[raymorris]

I'll have enough respect to ask my question in Larry's native language: /\/\/%Â*&(.{5,93}[0-F])$/

Actually I love Perl. I can program in any of several languages and Perl is my all-around favorite. I just can't think of a question because if I had a question for Larry, I would have asked it by now.

Re:I'll show some respect

[Anonymous Coward]

Me too, most of the perl bashing comes from people who grew up in a time before everything had an api to interact with and we had to scrape data from large blocks of text designed for people to read.

Important question

[Anonymous Coward]

How can you sleep at nights?

Help me promote Perl 6

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm a big fan of Perl and still use it when I can for various personal projects and have been known to introduce it in official work-related tasks (where engineers were using batch files or shell scripts, etc.). I love Perl's terseness and flexibility. I learned regex from Perl in my first development job and it has stuck with me through a dozen different languages.

However, as many others have mentioned, it is falling out of favor, and in fact there are very few development shops that even have a need or desire for it. I've looked for Perl jobs and they rarely come up. It seems that most back-ends are now being written in any number of next-gen scripting languages like Python, JavaScript (NodeJS), and Swift. I don't see the advantages of these, but it's often hard to explain to colleagues, CTOs, managers, etc. the value of Perl over the newest trends. And Perl "6" is meaningless because to everyone else it's still Perl. Why should we choose Perl 6 over the new establishment?

Re:Help me promote Perl 6

[fahrbot-bot]

I've looked for Perl jobs and they rarely come up.

Most often, you don't get a job to use Perl, you use Perl to get your job done.

I've been continuously employed since 1987, at a small private software development company, the NASA Langley Research Center, The New York Times and currently a (very) large defense contractor, as a Software Engineer and Systems Administrator (on everything from PCs to a Cray 2) and have used and still use Perl every day for production work.

Re:Help me promote Perl 6

[tnk1]

This is true. I've been employed for close to twenty years now, and only a few times has perl been in the job description.

And I have used it at every job I have worked at since 1997. Not because I was required to know it, but because I had something that needed to get done, and that did the job. And still does do the job.

In fact, you're only reason to not walk into a job with up to date perl knowledge and use it at least every so often is if you get employed by a brogramming shop where they sneer at you for not knowing the favor of the month language. And they then fail about six months later after they burned through the financing by trying to "improve coding practices" instead of actually producing anything.

Re:Help me promote Perl 6

[mr_mischief]

http://job.listings.cpanel.net...

What's your computer set-up look like?

[LichtSpektren]

Can you give us a glimpse into what your main work computer looks like? What's the hardware and OS, your preferred editor and browser, and any crucial software you want to give a shout-out to?

Re:What's your computer set-up look like?

[Anonymous Coward]

Also give us insight into any potential security vulnerabilities your system may have. And your IP address(es), please.

If it's not too much trouble, the location of your porn collection would also be helpful.

Re:What's your computer set-up look like?

[Anonymous Coward]

Larry uses vim.
IÂve seen him do presentations to 500 people using vim.

Perl in the embedded world

[mykepredko]

HI Larry

What has been done to port Perl to very small devices as a tool to create test applications? I'm doing some control work right now and testing/characterizing devices and peripherals with the results generating a set of csv data on the console that is copy and pasted into Excel.

I am really asking about small 32bit devices (with floating point units) - Cortex M4 specifically. I don't think a port could be created for an 8bit processor like the AVR.

Thanx!

Re:Perl in the embedded world

[Anonymous Coward]

You might be interested in the following resources:

• Debian ArmHardFloatPort
• Perl in Debian 8 (Jessie)

Cortex M4 is supported; hope this helps. -PCP

Re:Perl in the embedded world

[mykepredko]

Yes it does.

Thank you

Perl and PHP

[hcs_$reboot]

PHP got a lot of inspiration from Perl, while missing key concepts (you know this one). However, thanks to web development PHP is currently one of the most popular languages.
What is your honest opinion about PHP? Are there things in PHP, missing in Perl, you regret not having thought about?
Reversely, which Perl features PHP should have taken?

$_

Re:Perl and PHP

[Anonymous Coward]

Are there things in PHP, missing in Perl, you regret not having thought about?

One of the very few things I like about PHP is how easy it is to serialize/deserialize JSON from/to an object tree using native functions, and use that tree. So far, only ActionScript 3+ is better at this.
Accessing a subnode of the object tree in PHP has a much cleaner notation than in Perl5 (a->b->c instead of a->{'b'}->{'c'} ), and Perl5 has issues serializing to the correct JSON types because it forgets type information of variables.

Re:I want to know

[quenda]

What kinda drugs did he take to create that crap?

I believe Larry indulges heavily in the opium of the masses.

Re:Muslim madmen are on the lose

[Anonymous Coward]

I assume you mean "loose", loser.

Project governance

[njahnke]

Do you know of any project governance models that are 'known good' other than BDFL? It seems to me like 'caring' is the key to project success - and the BDFL him/herself, presumably, cares a great deal and inspires others to care a great deal. I've always wondered whether this known good level of success could be achieved with some modicum of democracy or in a project that is part of a larger project (and the project manager is appointed from above rather than self-selected). I've heard some good things about Apple's DRI or directly responsible individual, but it doesn't seem like other groups have had as much success implementing it, which makes me wonder about the method. By the way, thank you for all your work on Perl - it has brought me great fortune.

Achieving Escape Velocity From Perl5's Gravity

[Baldrson]

Perl6 seems to offer a lot in the base language, obviating many CPAN modules, but the network-effect of CPAN modules creates a gravitational field which, in combination with the differences in the base language, makes reaching escape velocity to Perl6 challenging.

What is the strategy for achieving escape velocity from Perl5's orbit to Perl6's?

LAnguage

[c0d3r]

Do you think there is a language more powerful than perl?

Re:LAnguage

[Anonymous Coward]

Lisp, Haskell for starters.

How can Perl6 become more attractive?

[bauerbob]

With so many years in development, especially the language specification, it seems like Perl6 must have the most sophisticated design of all programming languages. Unfortunately it has no killer application (yet), and Perl6 code doesn't look as beautiful as Ruby code. What is being done to make Perl6 more attractive?

Double Question

[shaitand]

1. According to most metrics Perl 5 usage hasn't decreased but there is a perception problem indicating it has. Perl usage outstrips python by a lot but many think the opposite is true. Why do you think this perception exists? Is it related to calling the new language Perl 6 giving people the false impression that Perl 5 hasn't progressed as dramatically as it has in the past few years?

2. As a Perl 5 programmer, why should I care about Perl 6? Perl is most used by sysadmins and Perl 5 of some sort can be found on all major *nix distributions out of the box. Without this support Perl 6 might as well not even exist for this group who already have to code for Perl versions a decade out of date in many cases. How, if at all, do you see Perl 6 resolving this problem or do you see Perl 6 hitting a different base altogether?

Intellectual Property

[ytene]

As the recently re-trial of the case brought by Oracle against Google (over use of JAVA structures in Android) shows, intellectual property is and will remain hot property. One of the interesting things about intellectual property and languages, however, is how much of the syntax of supposedly different languages is remarkably similar (with a lot of inheritance from C).

May I ask for your views with respect to firstly protecting the intellectual property that you have invested in Perl as a language, but then perhaps also the wider challenge of IP with respect to programming languages and actual software packages?

[ Profound apologies to the moderators if that is two questions; I think they are too tightly linked to separate out ]...

How can we get PERL into the browser?

[Proudrooster]

Larry, PERL is a great language, the swiss-army chain saw.

My question is, how can we strategically pull the PERL language into the browser? Javascript and PHP are getting all the browser action. We know that Embperl and Mod_perl exist for server side scripting, but how can we can PERL into the browser? Do you have friends at Google/Apple/Firefox?

Re:How can we get PERL into the browser?

[Anonymous Coward]

http://fglock.github.io/Perlito/perlito/perlito5.html

Re:How can we get PERL into the browser?

[Anonymous Coward]

FYI, It's either "Perl" or "perl". Perl is not an acronym.

Re:How can we get PERL into the browser?

[Anonymous Coward]

how can we strategically pull the PERL language into the browser?

The Perl Foundation has funded a grant to extend Rakudo, the preeminent Perl6 compiler, so that it can generate JavaScript.
  http://news.perlfoundation.org/2016/02/ian-hague-perl-6-grant-applica.html

You can see the repo for the work here: https://github.com/pmurias/rakudo-js

and read updates from the developer's blog here: http://blogs.perl.org/users/pawel_murias/

 

How to think in Perl 6

[mattr]

I'd like to express my deep, unending thanks for building something that is really wonderful, Perl, and a wonderful community. I made a living with Perl, the first postmodern language of which I am aware, and derived a lot of enjoyment from TMTOWTDI, and contributed back to the community on Perl Monks at the time. It was a lot of fun to meet some of the famous, talented Perl visionaries then. I enjoy thinking in Perl and it has made me stronger.

I'd like to get into Perl 6 which having stolen all the cool stuff from the other languages appears likely to be the most advanced and artistic of all them. At the very least I look forward to being able one day to think in Perl 6.

Can you provide some examples to /. readers about why you like Perl 6, and what dimensions of awesomeness are waiting beyond Python and Javascript? I think you would be a good person to rouse a wakeup call.

That, and if you have a moment, how about a good reason or three (efficiency? creativity? extensibility? ability to suggest further growth? having lots of PhDs?) why Google should promote Perl 6 in-house and support the growth of the Perl 6 language and implementations. Perhaps sponsor completion of the Perl 6 kernel for Jupyter project? How about sponsor some people to document and make accessible free books? What are some Perl 6 initiatives that could use some eyes if not $$?

Re: I want to know

[Anonymous Coward]

See the VICTUALS file in the pugs repo for details

Flying Cars

[WorBlux]

Given that every other famous Larry in tech seems to be starting their own secret flying car factory, when are you going to start yours?

Re:How do you perceive English predominance in the

[Hognoxious]

What I imagine has happened is that they start programming a language, look at the keyboard and think "What is the best key to use here?" and then take one that has not yet been used and which one can be accessed easily?

I can't imagine why they'd do anything else.

Would you choose, for your most common punctuation, something that you have to take your shoes off to type?

I'll tell you what, editing html/xml is a bastard on AZERTY, with the > < on the same key.

There's more than one way to do it

[Anonymous Coward]

I'd write a question, but nobody else would be able to read it.

How did you make perl so reliable?

[silvergeek]

I'm "retired" now, but I used perl for many years to implement projects, some of which were complex. It never ceased to amaze me how bug-free perl was (compared to VB, for sure!) in spite of its complexity and power. How did you do it?

question

[Anonymous Coward]

$_='while(read+STDIN,$_,2048){$a=29;$b=73;$c=142;$t=255;@t=map{$_%16or$t^=$c^=(
$m=(11,10,116,100,11,122,20,100)[$_/16%8])$t^=(72,@z=(64,72,$a^=12*($_%16
-2?0:$m&17)),$b^=$_%64?12:0,@z)[$_%8]}(16..271);if((@a=unx"C*",$_)[20]&48){$h
=5;$_=unxb24,join"",@b=map{xB8,unxb8,chr($_^$a[--$h+84])}@ARGV;s/...$/1$&/;$
d=unxV,xb25,$_;$e=256|(ord$b[4])>8^($f=$t&($d>>12^$d>>4^
$d^$d/8))>8^($t&($g=($q=$e>>14&7^$e)^$q*8^$q>=8)+=$f+(~$g&$t))for@a[128..$#a]}print+x"C*",@a}';s/x/pack+/g;eval

?

Perl 6 for Perl 5 developers

[Anonymous Coward]

We have been using Perl 5 at work for several years. We have a fairly large Perl 5 code base that we use in production that uses a fair number of CPAN modules. Would you consider Perl 6 to now be production ready and if so what is the best way to start switching over to Perl 6.

Re:Perl 6 for Perl 5 developers

[b2gills]

I wouldn't make any major applications in it just yet, but there are people who have said that they have used it in production in smaller roles.
Really it is a fairly big departure from pretty much all other languages including Perl 5, so I would recommend just tinkering with it for a while.
There is an Inline::Perl5 for Perl 6 and an Inline::Perl6 for Perl 5, so you could write small tools in Perl 6 that integrate with your existing Perl 5 codebase.

favorite of the "newer" scripting languages

[Anonymous Coward]

Have you looked at the "newer" scripting languages that have become predominant in the 21st century?
Any comments on php or javascript on the server?

Parrot VM

[Anonymous Coward]

I was excited by the Parrot VM which was going to be the back-end for Perl 6 since it allowed many languages other than Perl to be compiled into Parrot bytecode and thus was slated to provide an unprecedented form of interoperability between languages.

Considering that this planet is now adopting WebAssembly as the new universal bytecode for all languages to compile into for running in the portable operating systems that earthlings call "browsers", what is your stance on compilation to a multi-purpose bytecode? Specifically, is it a good or bad thing that Parrot and Perl6 parted ways?

Re:Parrot VM

[b2gills]

Rakudo and Parrot started to go in different directions well before they officially parted ways.

Perl 6 wouldn't be where it is today without Parrot, it also wouldn't be here if Rakudo still supported it.

Re:Parrot VM

[mr_mischief]

Rakudo can output JavaScript source as one of its backends. Getting that to do WebAssembly isn't an unreasonable idea. It also supports the JVM and MoarVM (its primary target).

So, how do YOU skin a cat?

[Anonymous Coward]

I've..... just always... wanted to know... y'know?

Premeditated?

[Anonymous Coward]

Did you plan on killing Perl, or did it just happen?

LISA '96, Chicago

[Nethead]

Been there, done that, got the t-shirt. Larry, Tom and Randal signed it.

There was ice cream too.

Moose and Perl5

[Anonymous Coward]

Will Moose and the metaobject protocol be implemented in C and integrated into core Perl 5?

Re:Moose and Perl5

[b2gills]

There is a project similar to Moose that has been worked on that is planned to go into Perl 5.

Also Larry hasn't been active with Perl 5 for 15 years, so not actually a good question for him

If you got a 'Do Over' for Perl6..

[jjn1056]

Hi Larry,

I'm a profession Perl5 programmer who is very worried about the future of my language. I remember when you kicked off Perl6 in the very late 1990s the talk was that it would replace Perl5. Clearly that never happened. If you could redo the project what might you do differently?

What do you think about JIT and Perl?

[Anonymous Coward]

One of the major downsides in Perl is that it is very hard to make critical paths faster. The only options currently (except finding a better algorithm) are all essentially using a different language, either completely or with XS or Inline::$Something. Javascript got a massive boost in popularity with the JIT in googles v8 engine. At the same time the Perl6 implementations are still pretty slow.

Any chance we'll see something like v8 for Perl in the future?

Re:What do you think about JIT and Perl?

[mr_mischief]

You may want to check out cperl or rperl. There's also a lot of work going on for performance with Perl6 and in some simple programs it's already faster than Perl5.

Rational behind the major syntax changes in 6?

[colin_faber]

Hi Larry, As a long time perl hacker, and contributor of various modules to CPAN I'm wondering what the rational was behind the major syntax changes in perl 6? I've read various items trying to explain it, but none so far have done a very good job. Admittedly I haven't fully grasp perl 6 yet (mostly because it involves learning a new language I thought I knew well).

Patch and git

[waveclaw]

What are your views on version control systems like git and modern development practices around them?

Early F/OSS development practices started with tarballs and patches, moved to packages and VCSes then to (a)social coding with DVCS like Mercurial or git. You've been there for most if not all of that.

git can be described as a distributed content management system for patches. Linux Torvals' git --am workflow can be likened to playing chess via email but with kernel development the end game and patches as moves.

And thank you for patch, by the way. The diff command outputs the difference between two files. You wrote the patch command to take diff output and turn one file into another, including the ability to even go backwards and undo that change later. As someone who's had to package software for a Linux distribution this is critically important tool. Patch lets me preserve the original author's work. But patch (and quilt) lets me still apply needed changes and store those changes in obvious discrete packets of standard format that are diff files.

Why isn't PERL more windows freindly

[goombah99]

My pet theory of why Perl has lost favor to Python is that it's really a unix language. You can run it on a windows box but only with a lot of effort to install and to maintain it. It seems to me that Perl could be more successful if one could get it adopted intrinsically into the Windows environment. A common, mistaken, lament about perl is all the sigils that make it look like swearing. But those actually add meaning (I can tell what's an array, a reference, a glob, or a scalar) and they are familiar to bash users. But one can see how windows users aren't steeped in this so perl gets a bad rap. If Microsoft were to distribute an app that ran a perl shell with all the first class privileges their own shells have Perl would be widely adopted as a superior do-it-all administration language.

Thoughts?

Re:Why isn't PERL more windows freindly

[Anonymous Coward]

Is it that hard to install and maintain? Strawberry Perl works great on Windows. I haven't found it to be any more awkward install and use than Python on Windows.

Re: Why isn't PERL more windows freindly

[Anonymous Coward]

I think it would be hard for Perl to compete with Powershell on Windows, especially since it leverages .NET. It does use $ sigils for variables so it has something in common with Perl.

Re:Why isn't PERL more windows freindly

[Anonymous Coward]

You have the Strawberry Perl and ActiveState Perl distributions for windows.

Re:Why isn't PERL more windows freindly

[goombah99]

The thing is if it's not a first class entity then you can't really base anything durable on it. If *nix updates you know for sure that bash and perl are going to work. But if windows updates or the straberry maitainers slack off then your whole code base could be munched if you invested in perl and things break it. Similarly having a dozen different ways to install perl will lead to divergences. Thus it needs a reference installation platform that can't ever fail.

Re: Why isn't PERL more windows freindly

[goombah99]

Perl has quite a large back catalog too. And it offers cross system compatibility unlike .net.

Re:Why isn't PERL more windows freindly

[Anonymous Coward]

I wrote some python scripts to control some lab equipment a year ago, and it used standard libraries, plus Numpy, plus one other. It was effortless to make work on Linux and I needed one small change to make it work on OSX (because of the ancient versions on the default python install). A month later when there was interest from other people to use those scripts, it took a massive amount of wrangling and support on my end to help other, moderately technical users to get the scripts to work on Windows machines. The scripts didn't need changing, but the process of installing python and two libraries can be quite messy on Windows, either in cygwin or not. The result was a request that further tools not be developed in python.

Re:Why isn't PERL more windows freindly

[Magius_AR]

My pet theory of why Perl has lost favor to Python is that it's really a unix language. You can run it on a windows box but only with a lot of effort to install and to maintain it.

That hasn't been true since the advent of Strawberry Perl.

Re:Why isn't PERL more windows freindly

[david_thornley]

I'd think those reasons would apply equally well to Python, or, for that matter, anything that isn't PowerShell.

Re:Why isn't PERL more windows freindly

[Anonymous Coward]

And how, exactly, is that any different from Python on Windows?

In what scenario is Perl 6 most ideal?

[orlanz]

Use the best tool for the job they say. There are many areas that Perl excels at. But in your personal opinion, what kinds of scenarios, situations, tasks, and jobs are most ideal for Perl? What is it the best tool for?

Where are languages headed?

[Anonymous Coward]

What will be the big changes in programming languages over the longer term, let's say 50 years?

Language Design

[columbus]

Hi Larry

Thank you for your contributions to the field of Computer Science.

My question is: in your opinion, what are the most important things to consider when designing a new computer language?

Why is Perl missing from coursera...

[Vijayvithal]

I can find dozens of courses on Coursera where Ruby/Python/Javascript are used as the programming language for courses related to Data Science, Machine learning, web development or just basic programming. But not a single course based on either Perl5 or Perl6 is available on the various MOOC sites. Do you see any potential for Perl5/6 to be the language of choice for teaching any technical concept? Any examples where Perl is breaking new ground?

What are your top 3 mistakes with perl5 and perl 6

[Anonymous Coward]

HI Larry, first I just want to thank you for creating Perl 5, with Perl you made the world a better place.

I would like to know: What are your top 3 mistakes with perl5 and perl 6?

cheers,
Matthijs
Amsterdam

programming in your language

[Anonymous Coward]

Do you find programming in a language you created makes you a more skilled programmer? My thinking is if you program in a language that works the way you think you have an advantage, where as me and most the world are stuck using languages of others so we will always be at a handicap.

Parallel Computing

[coldr3ality]

Does the Perl 6 development team rather fancy the idea of fully equipping the language for cutting-edge, massively-parallel environments, as in neural networks?

Re:How do you perceive English predominance in the

[Anonymous Coward]

and for people who use a qwerty this is pretty obvious, as it is on the same key. The / is at the bottom and the ? is at the top.

There are multiple qwerty layouts. Mine has all the faults you listed for azerty-BE. (Many European layouts share the same flaws, for a programmer.)

Perhaps you meant "for people who use US/UK keyboard layouts"?

Posting anon since I've moderated.

email exchanges

[jjlilj]

Whenever comparing geek-cred, I mention that I've received personal email responses from Larry Wall and Guido Von Rossum.

What's the most famous person/people you've exchanged email with? Steve, Bill, Linus, Bjarne?

P.S. I use Perl every day at work. Thank you.

Re:How do you perceive English predominance in the

[Anonymous Coward]

I'll tell you what, editing html/xml is a bastard on AZERTY, with the > < on the same key.

Editing html/xml is a bastard on any keyboard layout...

Is it true

[Anonymous Coward]

I've heard you can really read perl code. Is that true?

The Pink Sequin Jacket mystery

[Anonymous Coward]

Larry, in 1992 at the USENIX conference in San Francisco, the rumor was that you attended one of the after-function parties in a "pink sequin sport coat". I was there at the event, but for the life of me I cannot remember the details (I know, pink sequin jacket, how could I forget?) Well, the question is: Do you have a photo of yourself in that jacket at that event and if so, please post it. Thanks.

Perl

[Anonymous Coward]

Is that still a thing?

conditional modifiers

[jabberw0k]

...come from Digital's BASIC-PLUS that ran under RSTS/E on a PDP-11, a setup that Larry mentions in the appendix of the Camel book (I was blessed (cursed?) to use BASIC-PLUS-2 in my high school job).

Odd Naming

[Anonymous Coward]

Hey Larry,

As someone who doesnt much care for python and likes the use of sigils, one thing that has put me off from Perl is the naming of things. For example, using has, my, what, our, spurt, chomp, slurp. I'm sure youd get used to it after a while but why cant there be more common language used? Why my instead of private? Why what instead of type? Why slurp instead of Read-File?

Next interviewee (request)

[Anonymous Coward]

Elizabeth Holmes

Thanks

[billmarrs]

Hi Larry. I just wanted to say thank you. I love Perl. I've used it for decades. It's still my first choice. My websites still happily use it. This language you created has had a major positive impact on my life.

Poor regex performance in pathological cases...

[Anonymous Coward]

Perl was influenced in significant part by the suite of regular expression utilities available for Unix platforms, including sed, grep, and awk. All of these programs convert the specified regular expression into a finite automaton with well-bounded performance characteristics. Besides the obvious benefit of limiting memory consumption, the restricted model of the finite automaton allows us to resolve the bothersome question of the halting problem. And of course, the execution environment of a finite automaton cannot be subverted, as it lacks Turing completeness.

Yet Perl (and Python, and PHP, and Ruby) all chose to implement regular expression functionality through a kind of recursive backtracking approach, which leaves the parser vulnerable to performance degradation under particular search conditions -- conditions that may not reveal themselves under testing, but nevertheless expose the system to a serious denial of service vulnerability. While there are a few features (such as backreferences) that aren't available under the NFA model, I think most programmers would be better served by the improved performance and security that the older model provided.

It's worth noting that while most scripting languages have followed Perl's approach, modern systems languages continue to use the NFA model. Both Go and Rust use NFAs for regex parsing.

For more information on this, please see this article by Russ Cox (co-designer of Go): https://swtch.com/~rsc/regexp/regexp1.html

TL;DR: What was the rationale for breaking with the tradition of parsing regular expressions via NFAs? Would you change that decision if you had the opportunity to do so?

Reluctant to use Perl 6

[ReadParse]

This year I celebrate 20 years as a Perl guy. I have used it continuously, regardless of the languages used predominantly, and it has made me seem to be able to do the impossible, or at least the highly improbable. Thank you, Larry, for sharing Perl.

I don't pretend that Perl is necessarily able to to most things any better than other modern interpreted languages (autovivification notwithstanding), but I come back to it again and again -- partially for the same reasons that I usually start speaking in English. It is my first language, and my most fluent.

Perl 5 has been meeting my needs for literally my entire career. There's probably something in Perl 6 that I might find useful, but I have found that I have about as much desire to break open Perl 6 as any other new language that I have not yet looked at.

It would help my guilty conscience to receive your absolution. Or am I being unreasonable in my continued, pragmatic use of Perl 5 and it's amazing library of modules, both old and new?

Peace be upon you.

The future of performance

[John Da' Baddest]

Do you see a way forward to a "high performance" Perl for a niche of use-cases in which fast response times (low latency) is major consideration? This isn't meant to trigger a "fast enough" flame war, but rather, to gain insight and make comparisons with perceived competitors such as Cython, Rpython, and Pypy.

Re:The future of performance

[mr_mischief]

Take a look at rperl and cperl.

has Perl 6 flopped?

[b2gills]

How could it have flopped in just 6 months? Especially as I regularly see new people on irc.freenode.net#perl6. (we also had to split up the channel because it was getting difficult to discuss the actual implementation because of all the activity)

I will grant you that the Perl 6 project is a lot older than that. I'm actually glad it wasn't a rush job, just image how bad of a language it would have been as a result <cough>php</cough>.

You're probably one of those people who are deluded into thinking that Perl25 is on its deathbed. In fact there has been more activity on the Perl5 core in the past 5 years than there was on the previous 10 years. ( Actually a similar thing could be said about Perl6 as well )

Re:has Perl 6 flopped?

[arth1]

You're probably one of those people who are deluded into thinking that Perl25 is on its deathbed.

You're probably an IFTJ, ascribing people views they haven't conveyed and that has no basis in reality.

I assume you mean perl5? No, it's obviously not on its death bed.
Or did you mean perl 5.25, and that it might not be released? I am sure it will, and I'm also sure that people won't jump to get it, because since the early versions of perl5, there has been lots of new stuff, but not much at all that is a must-have for other than perl developers.

And where perl has its strength, and it does, is as a language for sysadmins and others who need more power than is easily obtained with sh, and which doesn't require a full development effort.

Many contributing Perl developers have, unfortunately, lost touch with the perl userbase, and been striving to forget the p in perl.
As long as it's practical, it's going to be used. If it requires jumping through hoops, it won't, even if it provides new functionality.
Look at the perl out there in the field, and you'll find that almost all of it is relatively simple stuff. Many (I'd say most!) users don't even use OO except by accident, and in some cases deliberately avoiding it. And modules where the api or requirements have changed are being avoided like the plague - even when significantly improved. They break existing scripts, and prevent backwards compatibility. If a module suddenly requires perl 5.18+, the solution in the field is not to upgrade to perl 5.18, but to ditch the module.

The perl core is what's important. Including backwards and cross-system compatibility.
Adding functionality is fine. No one complains about that. But breaking existing stuff to do so is not. And neither is expecting users to do perl a certain way (which goes against all that perl stands for), or always be at the latest version.

perl5 is very much alive. Mostly thanks to all the users; those who don't post on the dev forums, and don't hang out on perlmonks to gank n00bs. People who welcome bug fixes, new optional modules and more and better example based documentation.
That's the real drivers for perl 5.25, no matter what the core team might think.

a#^b$

[Anonymous Coward]

@#$ #%f@!s?

New language for mobile devices

[worldtech-a3x]

Can you create a new language for easy programming on mobile devices?

It would have to be concise, because typing is hard on touch screens. In that sense it would be similar to Perl.

Thanks for inventing Perl!

Can Perl 6 modules alter the type system?

[Anonymous Coward]

In Stop Designing Languages. Write Libraries Instead", language designer Patrick S. Li writes "No mainstream language today allows you to write a library to extend its type system.".

Can Perl 6 modules alter the type system?

Re:Can Perl 6 modules alter the type system?

[david_thornley]

When did Li write that? In C++, complex types are in the standard library, not built into the language itself. Boost provides more C++ mathematical types.

Re:Can Perl 6 modules alter the type system?

[Anonymous Coward]

The article I linked says

> Patrick S. Li - May 29, 2016

The question isn't about adding or altering types. It's about adding to or altering the type system.

Perl 6 is mainly written in itself and makes the mechanics behind all its features such as its various kinds of types available via metaprogramming features. So, in theory folk can just drop in a module to add some new type system mechanism or kind of type. I was curious to see whether Larry will shoot me down with a dose of reality or confirm it's as powerful as it looks "on paper".

Semantics

[Anonymous Coward]

I've been using and loving perl5 for more than 20 years. But I'm still surprised it never had a formal semantics. Is that something you regret and would change given a re-run, or were there advantages (eg syntactic freedom) that outweigh the disadvantages (eg IDE support)?

Can you explain "universal unrestricted grammar"?

[Anonymous Coward]

The Wikipedia page on "Unrestricted Grammar" says "The equivalence of unrestricted grammars to Turing machines implies the existence of a universal unrestricted grammar, a grammar capable of accepting any other unrestricted grammar's language given a description of the language."

It seems that, if anyone could explain what that means to a mere mortal, it would be Larry Wall...

Re:I want to know

[david_thornley]

Have you considered the frightening possibility that Wall designed Perl without the use of recreational pharmaceuticals?

Changing sigils

[david_thornley]

If I have a hash %foo, then a use would be $foo{bar}. Given an array @foo, a use would be $foo[bar]. Not only does the change from % or @ to $ throw me a bit sometimes, the visual difference between those two different things is braces vs. brackets, and as my eyes age that's not really enough.

Could you tell me about the design of sigils, and why they were done the way they are?

Re:Changing sigils

[Anonymous Coward]

> If I have a hash %foo, then a use would be $foo{bar}.

In Perl 6 this no longer applies. One would write %foo{bar} instead.

> Given an array @foo, a use would be $foo[bar].

@foo[bar] in Perl 6.

> the visual difference between those two different things is braces vs. brackets, and as my eyes age that's not really enough.

As explained above, variables with explicit plural sigils (@ and %) keep their sigils all but eliminating the problem with [ and { looking similar.

But there are other cases.

Some changes further *improve* the situation for you. These are equivalent in Perl 6:

%foo{'bar'}
%foo<bar>

Other changes makes things more difficult:

my @foo = 1,2,3;
say @foo[1];

can be written:

my \foo = 1,2,3;
say foo[1];

(The \ "sigil" is like a no-sigil-please sigil used when declaring a sigil-free SSA (single static assignment) variable.)

Combine PERL 5 + 6 as a bridge?

[Anonymous Coward]

Hi Larry -- I'm a longtime Perl 5 programmer and am glad that Perl 6 has now been released. Perl 6 looks wonderful, but there's an obstacle to fast adoption: backward incompatibility makes the Perl 5 --> 6 switch an all-or-nothing task.

Would it be possible for you to combine the Perl 6 and Perl 5 interpreters/compilers into a single Perl5+6 executable, so that we real-world Perl programmers can convert *gradually and incrementally*? That is, let us mark each section of code as either Perl 5 or Perl 6, and then the full program, with multiple sections of either type, can run perfectly? A section of code could be a subroutine, a package, or a file, for example.

Unfortunately, the existing technical approach, involving Inline::Perl5 is not perfectly compatible. Our existing large Perl 5 systems break down in this mode under Perl 6 -- there are too many differences.

Instead, I ask you whether you and the worldwide Perl team can create an interaction/bridge layer between the full Perl 6 interpreter/compiler, and the full Perl 5, so that subroutines on either side, running under a single, combined Perl5+6 executable, can correctly call each other and pass arguments and results?

If you give us that feature, it will be much easier for us to adopt Perl 6. We can replace one section of code at a time in our large Perl 5 systems with a corresponding Perl 6 section -- rather than having to rewrite an entire large system at once. And perhaps CPAN developers and CPAN users will even be able to convert their existing modules one at a time, without losing full compatibility.

In other words -- as a Perl lover, I'm asking whether you can please give more thought to providing us a better, more *incremental*, conversion path from Perl 5 to Perl 6?

Thank you!
--JAM @ PAUSE

Perl6 Multithreaded support summary?

[Anonymous Coward]

Can you please highlight the multi-threaded support in Perl6?

Also, can you highlight the international language support for all of Perl? http://perldoc.perl.org/perlun...

Care to discuss Âcperl the high-performance perl5? http://perl11.org/cperl/ Runtime performance of perl seems to have been decreasing over the years. Any consideration for following the Intel method of even/odd releases with features/performance optimizations being the even/odd primary efforts?

Have yet to attempt use perl6. Just trying to Âhave the appropriate amount of fun with my coding. ;)

Why not a simpler Perl 6?

[Anonymous Coward]

Perl 6 is overflowing with features, It's a huge language - why did you prefer implementing a big language rather than a more modest goal like updating Perl 5 or a adopting a simpler specification for Perl 6? And hindsight being 20/20, do you regret that decision?

How does Perl 5 make one liners more practical? 6?

[Anonymous Coward]

(Same question for scripts/programs of around 10 LOC, 100, 1K, 10K, and as many higher orders of magnitude as you care to share.)

Thoughts on Rawlinson's effect and Perls?

[Anonymous Coward]

The narrowest version of my questions is: Which programmers' fonts have the most visually subdued and most visually pronounced $, @ and % symbols?

The broadest version is: What are your thoughts on the neural correlates suggested by Rawlinson's effect to the love/hate response to sigils?

----

Evidence suggests there are neural circuits that process the first and last letters of words specially. More on that in a mo.

Building on this, I hypothesize that programmers' brains may sometimes interpret a sigil as the first letter of a variable and sometimes not and that one might be able to do or suggest things that encourage one or other view and thereby reduce/eliminate negative experiences and increase/ensure positive experiences.

Rawlinson's effect

The following so-called urban legend is unusual in that it's basically true for most people:

"Aoccdrnig to a rscheearch at an Elingsh uinervtisy, it deosn’t mttaer in waht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are, the olny iprmoetnt tihng is taht frist and lsat ltteer is at the rghit pclae. The rset can be a toatl mses and you can sitll raed it wouthit porbelm. Tihs is bcuseae we do not raed ervey lteter by it slef but the wrod as a wlohe."

Larry, did you read that at about full speed, like most folk?

It turns out that:

• Humans do something like treating the first and last letters of words specially. The letters in the middle just have to be sufficiently close to their right position to collectively reduce ambiguity so that only one word makes sense.
• Based on 1976 PhD thesis: The Significance of Letter Position in Word Recognition (summary) I believe this effect was first discovered by Graham Rawlinson in the 70s.

I'm calling this Rawlinson's effect (rather than Typoglycemia, partly in protest at how disrespectful I perceive that page to be toward Rawlinson).

Rawlinson's effect and sigils

What if the brain sometimes processes sigils as the first "letter" of a token and sometimes not?

I find that the sigil at the start of variables sometimes makes it:

• 1. Harder to take in an entire expression
• 2. Easier to take in the variables in a block of code

It's primarily a familiarity thing. Sigils are at their best when I can tune them in and out at will. This has happened when I've been reading a lot of Perl code daily for a while. I found #1 at its worst when I was first learning Perl. Since then it returns if I quit reading sigil'd code for a while and then return to it.

Anyhow, thoughts?