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Perl, Perl 6, and Two Application Frameworks Release 2017 Advent Calendars (perladvent.org)

Posted by EditorDavid on from the more-than-one-way-to-do-it dept.

An anonymous reader writes: Friday saw this year's first new posts on the Perl Advent Calendar, a geeky tradition first started back in 2000. It describes Santa including Unicode's "Father Christmas" emoji by enabling UTF-8 encoding and then using the appropriate hexadecimal code.

But in another corner of the North Pole, you can also unwrap the Perl 6 Advent Calendar, which this year celebrates the two-year anniversary of the official launch of Perl 6. Its first post follows a Grinch who used the but and does operators in Perl 6, while wrapping methods and subroutines to add extra sneaky features, "and even mutated the language itself to do our bidding."

Perl/Python guru Joel Berger has also started an advent calendar for the Mojolicious web application framework (written in Perl), and there's apparently also an advent calendar coming for the Perl Dancer web application framework.

8 of 38 comments (clear)

  1. ACs hate it by DCFusor · · Score: 2

    Real programmers just use it to get 'er done. I guess you feel embarrassed enough to want to hide your identity while displaying ignorance and intellectual laziness.

    --
    Why guess when you can know? Measure!
    1. Re:ACs hate it by NoNonAlphaCharsHere · · Score: 2, Funny

      Oh please. The only way perl could be more write-only was if there was a requirement that you carve it in granite.

    2. Re:ACs hate it by DCFusor · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Bad programmers can create write-only code in any language...I could name a few that are worse than perl, since they copied the regular expression engine and too-clever-by-half beginner people abuse the snot out of it. Is that what you mean? I don't know anyone who has troubles reading and maintaining my code in any language. Hmm...maybe it's not the language.

      --
      Why guess when you can know? Measure!
    3. Re: ACs hate it by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Interesting

      I havenâ(TM)t seen Perl in a long time but canâ(TM)t imagine itâ(TM)s never evolved into something which is basically the same as everything else by now.

      I have to admit the reason I donâ(TM)t bother with Python is that so far, most Python code Iâ(TM)ve seen has been Write-Only because just like Perl and PhP, the people writing most of the code in it has been âoeI donâ(TM)t want to learn to program, I just wanna do stuffâ.

      In the old days, it was BASIC, Visual Basic, sed and awk. I think that no matter what the individual merits of a programming language, generally languages that oversimplify the process of starting with a two line program and stringing together spaghetti after, it generally creates a toxic culture for the language.

      Consider this, if you search for answers to questions in Python, PHP or Perl, youâ(TM)ll almost always receive answers from coders not programmers. The result is code that gets the job done, but has absolutely no interest in doing it well.

    4. Re:ACs hate it by NoNonAlphaCharsHere · · Score: 2

      "Bad programmers can write bad programs" is a tautology. The problem with perl is that it makes it (really) hard for good programmers to make (and MAINTAIN) good programs.

    5. Re:ACs hate it by arth1 · · Score: 3, Interesting

      "Bad programmers can write bad programs" is a tautology.

      No, it isn't. Linguistically there's nothing tautological about "A can B", no matter what the relation between A and B is.

      The problem with perl is that it makes it (really) hard for good programmers to make (and MAINTAIN) good programs.

      There are many problems with perl, but unless you define what a "good program" is, this is meaningless.
      Perl gives programmers more rope than most languages. How they use that rope is up to them.

  2. How to tell if you've been using perl too long by NoNonAlphaCharsHere · · Score: 5, Funny

    If you see cartoon swearing, like "?#@*&%!" and think to yourself "That's silly, he should have used "#@$_" instead, it's more efficient", you're been using too much perl.

  3. Re:Perl by arth1 · · Score: 4, Informative

    You can see how non automatic it is because slashdot, which is written in Perl, is pretty much guaranteed to corrupt unicode characters in comments even though slashdot is is utf8.

    Slashdot had UTF-8 support for a short while a decade or so ago. It was turned back off again, because the perl support was too good, allowing things like right-to-left spaces, which the crowd here naturally pounced on.
    Turning it back on is easy enough, but unless someone spends a lot of time hardening the system, it will get abused again.

    As for your perl em-dash problem, why do you need to know the length, if it's a separator? Use the built-in functions that can deal with a separator of any length, and you should not have to write specific handling.