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Perl Advent Calendar Enters Its 17th Year (perladvent.org)
An anonymous reader writes:
Thursday brought this year's first new posts on the Perl Advent Calendar, a geeky tradition first started back in 2000. Friday's post described Santa's need for fast, efficient code, and the day that a Christmas miracle occurred during Santa's annual code review (involving the is_hashref subroutine from Perl's reference utility library). And for the last five years, the calendar has also had its own Twitter feed.
But in another corner of the North Pole, you can also unwrap the Perl 6 Advent Calendar, which this year celebrates the one-year anniversary of the official launch of Perl 6. Friday's post was by brian d foy, a writer on the classic Perl textbooks Learning Perl and Intermediate Perl (who's now also crowdfunding his next O'Reilly book, Learning Perl 6). foy's post talked about Perl 6's object hashes, while the calendar kicked off its new season Thursday with a discussion about creating Docker images using webhooks triggered by GitHub commits as an example of Perl 6's "whipupitude".
But in another corner of the North Pole, you can also unwrap the Perl 6 Advent Calendar, which this year celebrates the one-year anniversary of the official launch of Perl 6. Friday's post was by brian d foy, a writer on the classic Perl textbooks Learning Perl and Intermediate Perl (who's now also crowdfunding his next O'Reilly book, Learning Perl 6). foy's post talked about Perl 6's object hashes, while the calendar kicked off its new season Thursday with a discussion about creating Docker images using webhooks triggered by GitHub commits as an example of Perl 6's "whipupitude".
I've been a perl programmer for decades, and the number of hours I've spent debugging issues with automatic type conversion are in the single digits, and the number of problems I've encountered with string-to-numeric conversion is literally zero, and if you were burned by something like that in production, I'd ask you why you weren't writing tests.
There are indeed some odd issues you need to deal with when working with perl5, but they almost all revolve around a lack of standardization. There's something profoundly weird about perl critics, they continuously just *make shit up* to fit their narrative...
It was the first language I really learned in depth, and was seemingly built specifically for the tasks I worked on in those formative years.
Test automation, log / output parsing, HTTP / REST client, system administration scripts; Perl5 was the perfect level of abstraction for me, it's still my default pseudocode / mental model base when tackling problems.
The experience writing automation and admin scripts and apps made my current DevOps role a natural fit, we were doing a lot of the core principles before the term "DevOps" was even coined.