Re: [tlug] perl? (was: Employment for "oldies")

[Josh Glover <jmglov@example.com>]

On 18 August 2016 at 15:37, Attila Kinali <attila@example.com> wrote:

> Yes, perl is cryptic, almost archaic
> at places. But as someone comming from shell scripting, most of it
> feels kind of a natural extension. Yes, if you see a #@$_ it's weird
> at first, but you get used to it.

I think Perl gets some unfair criticism for "looking like line noise".
As you say, for those coming from shell scripting, and probably
replacing shell scripts with Perl, those characters feel like a
natural extension to awk / sed / grep / bash / etc. So no problem
there.

And for those writing large systems in Perl, they are not forced to
use the "reader macros", and in fact should actively be discouraged
from doing so. All of those crazy characters in Perl are just
shorthand for a human-readable variable.

If you really want to give Perl a fair shake, read Damian Conway's
"Object Oriented Perl"[1]. It should really be called "How to Write
Maintainable Code in Perl". It, along with the aforementioned
"Higher-Order Perl"[2], are the two books that any serious Perl
developer *must* read.

The key point here is that Perl is both a "scripting language" and a
"programming language". Neither use is less acceptable than the other,
but the stylistic differences between the two is huge. So before
criticising Perl as a shite language, consider which Perl you're
criticising. Perl has its warts, like all languages do, but its
enduring popularity should tell you something. Lisp is 1950s tech,
after all... ;)

Cheers,
Josh

[1] https://www.manning.com/books/object-oriented-perl
[2] http://hop.perl.plover.com/