use Perl

• The issues are... (Score:1)

  by jrockway (7171)

  So how are Modern Perl and Enlightened Perl different from the other similar initiatives?

  PBP was the first real step in the direction of "modernizing" Perl. It was a book that showed people that Perl isn't a toy, and isn't a "write-only" language. (Unfortunately some of the advice in the book was just wrong, like using Class::Std. What?)

  (I have never heard of Perl Enterprise Edition, and I am no marketing expert, but somehow I don't think "pee" is the way to make Perl popular again. Although it would pa
  • PBP is great, but it's sad it is needed (Score:1)

    by Ed Avis (3134)

    PBP is an excellent book but it is the most eloquent argument against Perl (and by implication, in favour of Python / Ruby / whatever) that I have read. Pretty much the whole book is a collection of gotchas and workarounds for crufty areas of the language that should have been cleared up years ago. The semantics of 'local $x;' are unclear and can trip up many programmers? OK, here is a sticking plaster. Shouldn't it simply be fixed in the language, with a sensible deprecation timetable and warnings as P

    --
    -- Ed Avis ed@membled.com
    • Re:PBP is great, but it's sad it is needed (Score:1)

      by jrockway (7171) on 2009.01.28 14:29 (#67081) Journal

      Pretty much the whole book is a collection of gotchas and workarounds for crufty areas of the language that should have been cleared up years ago.

      If you think there is any programming language that is not like this, you have not used that language long enough.

      The semantics of 'local $x;' are unclear and can trip up many programmers

      Anything can "trip up" programmers that don't know how to program. The semantics of local are quite clear. (Dynamic binding versus my's lexical binding. Not hard.)

      Shouldn't it simply be fixed in the language, with a sensible deprecation timetable and warnings as Python does? Unfortunately that seems to be impossible. Ditto two-arg open or $[ or hundreds of other fossilized linguistic warts which were surely useful in perl 4.036 but mostly serve to obfuscate or create subtle bugs today.

      Sure, maybe. But that's not going to happen. So you can either document the problems (which are not problems once you are fluent in Perl), or you can switch to Python. Not everyone has to use Perl, but it is such a good choice for most things that it's a shame to dismiss it based on some arbitrary "the language shouldn't have anything I don't want" criteria.

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      • Re: (Score:1)

        by chromatic (983)

        Not everyone has to use Perl, but it is such a good choice for most things that it's a shame to dismiss it based on some arbitrary "the language shouldn't have anything I don't want" criteria.

        There's something deeply wrong with a software development process that enshrines deliberate obfuscations in the core test suite.

        I don't accept the counter-argument "They test features not tested elsewhere", not in the least because I've added tests for features not otherwise tested (and my tests tend to be somewhat
        • Re: (Score:2)

          by Ovid (2709)

          I suspect that the deliberate obfuscation tests are necessary due to Perl's heuristic parsing. With Perl 6, I doubt there would be as much of a need for them.
          • Re: (Score:1)

            by chromatic (983)

            I suspect that the deliberate obfuscation tests are necessary due to Perl's heuristic parsing.

            That's an excuse for not figuring out what the heuristics should be and writing maintainable tests for them. Remember, these are tests intended to prevent the breakage of code which no one can prove actually exists.
      • Re: (Score:1)

        by Ed Avis (3134)

        The semantics of local are quite clear.

        Oh, having dynamically scoped variables is very useful and not difficult to understand. I was referring to the semantics of 'local $x;' in particular. What does that statement do? Is it useful and clear, or is it a fairly useless behaviour and a gotcha for the unwary? PBP makes a good argument for the latter.

        --
        -- Ed Avis ed@membled.com
      • Re: (Score:1)

        by chromatic (983)

        The semantics of local are quite clear.

        They're murky when you add in Perl 5 magic. (For everyone who doesn't follow p5p regularly, "magic" is a specific term of art you might recognize as that magic code which makes tie and overloading work.)