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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".
Perl can always be viewed as Python with C syntax. Why are some people so negative?
Allow the Perl libraries to manipulate data at warp speed and securely, rather than attempting to cobble together your own assembly language routines. Spend your time where it matters, optimizing algorithms and user interface.
If you read the post, it's about using a module for a common pattern. It happens that the module is faster than the naive approach too.
Also, Perl is known as the fastest of the general-purpose scripting languages. Whether that reputation is true or not, I don't know. But given that the interpreter has had twenty years of optimisation work poured into it, why wouldn't it be?
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...
My understanding is that it used to be the fastest dynamic language around, but some others have caught up to it-- it's not something I care about really, I just know it's fast enough I don't need to think about the issue.
I more interested in the fact that it's unicode support is better than almost every other language.
You are inside the Democratic Party, a place of broken dreams.
There are some abandoned fireworks on the ground here.
There is a shiny brass collar nearby.
There are some tasty memes here.
There is a bottle of tears here.
<blink>down the rabbit hole</blink>
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.
Agree. I'm semi-retired now but still do a little freelance. A while ago, I worked for BBC, UK Amazon offshoot etc. all of whom were big Perl shops. It's 'unusual' probably because of Larry Wall's background but natural (Do what I mean) and concise but readable (unlike APL, for example). Those that complain that it's 'line noise' need to write comments (remember those?) use use perltidy more often. Meanwhile CPAN, if one is selective, gives a lot of extra productivity.
I went to the London Perl Workshop yesterday: http://act.yapc.eu/lpw2016/ great day out, good community and, as usual I learnt a lot. Will try Perl 6 for something small this year too. I understand that it looks alien and takes some getting used to, but it's a great language.
On y va, qui mal y pense!