After first experiences with linux shell scripting, sed, awk, and C in 1990s, I found perl a welcome refuge. Way more featureful than DOS .bat files or BASIC! Its capabilities (perl + cpan) have always well exceeded my need for CS goodness. People do complain about the syntax, oddly, without mentioning the numerous ways perl was designed to make common tasks easy to do. The "use strict" pragma, and early adoption of testing culture are two examples where perl led the programming community. With the continued maturing of the language and ecosystem, I can only smile at the naysayers and wish them happiness whatever the language.
Perl was the first language I learned on my own after graduating university many years ago. I fell in love with it because of quirks like these and because code written in it can have a poetic quality you don't see often.
Now I am old and joyless and I want the code I write for work to be boring and unsurprising.
I learned Perl after trying C; and after struggling with `scanf` (not even getting to tokenization), the ease and speed of `while (<>) { @A = split;` for text-handling made it easy to fall in love. This (in the mid 90s, before Java, JavaScript, and C++ TR1) was also my first contact with associative arrays.
I was also drawn to the style of the Camel Book.
More than most other languages, Perl encouraged one-liners. When I later read PG's "Succinctness is power" essay, I thought of Perl.
This isn't the first time I've said this but also had an early-career job writing Perl code. And I actually got to the point where I liked it -- I mean I could see why it had a following.
Subsequently I've written code in almost every popular programming language and I will frequently go years between languages but even so I have very little trouble picking them back up. Even C++. But not Perl. It's just so weird with so many idiosyncrasies that I just can't remember it.
I discovered Perl directly after PHP before Web 2.0 days. Compared with the extreme, Java or (contemporary) Go, Perl codes (can) have a soul. Interestingly, modern ECMAScript (JS) brought in a few of the nice breweties from Perl world which I haven't seen a long time.
Perk is... quite a thing. I think if you like programming because you like believing you have secret knowledge... go for it. Perk will scratch that itch. But I do not believe it beings you closer to the pantheon of God's. Ai n't gonna stop anyone from dancing with the Satyrs though, if that's your jam.
fun thing about this page: i have gemini in the browser and when I asked it 'why is the entire Wall Family naming these things?' it said it couldn't engage. Turns out 'goatse' is a forbidden word to Gemini.
After first experiences with linux shell scripting, sed, awk, and C in 1990s, I found perl a welcome refuge. Way more featureful than DOS .bat files or BASIC! Its capabilities (perl + cpan) have always well exceeded my need for CS goodness. People do complain about the syntax, oddly, without mentioning the numerous ways perl was designed to make common tasks easy to do. The "use strict" pragma, and early adoption of testing culture are two examples where perl led the programming community. With the continued maturing of the language and ecosystem, I can only smile at the naysayers and wish them happiness whatever the language.
They one they named "baby cart" is something I have used to interpolate expressions into a string. Eg
produces instead of having to do:Perl was the first language I learned on my own after graduating university many years ago. I fell in love with it because of quirks like these and because code written in it can have a poetic quality you don't see often.
Now I am old and joyless and I want the code I write for work to be boring and unsurprising.
But sometimes one can still want to write poetry.
Agreed!
I learned Perl after trying C; and after struggling with `scanf` (not even getting to tokenization), the ease and speed of `while (<>) { @A = split;` for text-handling made it easy to fall in love. This (in the mid 90s, before Java, JavaScript, and C++ TR1) was also my first contact with associative arrays.
I was also drawn to the style of the Camel Book.
More than most other languages, Perl encouraged one-liners. When I later read PG's "Succinctness is power" essay, I thought of Perl.
https://paulgraham.com/power.html
This isn't the first time I've said this but also had an early-career job writing Perl code. And I actually got to the point where I liked it -- I mean I could see why it had a following.
Subsequently I've written code in almost every popular programming language and I will frequently go years between languages but even so I have very little trouble picking them back up. Even C++. But not Perl. It's just so weird with so many idiosyncrasies that I just can't remember it.
I'm having to write a lot more perl at work than I would prefer to. It's still poetry, I suppose, but mostly of the bathroom-stall variety.
I discovered Perl directly after PHP before Web 2.0 days. Compared with the extreme, Java or (contemporary) Go, Perl codes (can) have a soul. Interestingly, modern ECMAScript (JS) brought in a few of the nice breweties from Perl world which I haven't seen a long time.
Perk is... quite a thing. I think if you like programming because you like believing you have secret knowledge... go for it. Perk will scratch that itch. But I do not believe it beings you closer to the pantheon of God's. Ai n't gonna stop anyone from dancing with the Satyrs though, if that's your jam.
fun thing about this page: i have gemini in the browser and when I asked it 'why is the entire Wall Family naming these things?' it said it couldn't engage. Turns out 'goatse' is a forbidden word to Gemini.
OMG! The Goatsie operator =( )= is WILD! wilder than the glob wild operator *