from Hacker News

Half My Life with Perl

by oalders on 12/19/24, 12:49 AM with 131 comments

  • by kamaal on 12/19/24, 4:12 AM

    Perl is one of those power tools(as recommended in Let Over Lambda, together with vim and Lisp), if you learn it well enough to be good at it, and early enough in your career- You really have a mad productivity work horse. Its really one of those things which save tons of time and effort. A bit like O(1) hack of the productivity world.

    Perhaps at the core of this just how many what we called regular programming tasks are just knowing how to work with text and unixy operating system. Perl is just unbelievably awesome at this. Another big edge of Perl is commitment to backwards compatibility, most people who learned Perl early in their careers decades back can use it on-demand basis. Its universally installed, fast and scripts written from the earliest days continue to run with 0 changes, despite endless OS upgrades.

    Early enough in the timeline Perl was full unix hackers, and you learned a lot from them, this culture further bolsters Perl's productivity credentials. Not a week passes, that I have to whip up a Perl script to do something for someone has a 2 people and a month budget to do. And they are often amazed it can be done this quickly.

    CPAN is another big edge Perl has. No other language apart from JS/npm ecosystem has anything close, and these are basically competing in very different domains so to that end CPAN really doesn't have a competition till date.

    If you are looking to build using Perl do checkout the Camel book and HOP by mjd.

  • by temporallobe on 12/19/24, 5:18 AM

    Perl is my first love, and I still whip it out from time to time to do system tasks (anything in the linux world). It is literally installed on any *nix OS, macOS included. Python is fine, but it’s not as universal as Perl. I also feel like Perl is more “batteries included” as many times I can be productive without “use”ing any libraries. It’s has been my secret weapon over the years. I’ve also noticed that most younger engineers don’t know it, and if they know any scripting language at all, it’s of course python.

  • by oniony on 12/19/24, 12:30 PM

    My first experience with Perl was back in 1999. I was fresh out of university working at a dot-com start-up web agency and was asked to take ownership of a project after the developer had left the company. It was pretty straightforward CGI project, with some functions that aligned one-to-one with the database tables. Quite clean code. I made the changes I needed to make easily enough for the first couple of bug fixes or features.

    But then I had to change the code behind a different database table and the function that backed it did not exist in the codebase. I found the code that called the function, but the function definition itself was nowhere. I was literally stumped and spent hours thinking our versioning system (Source Safe) had failed, or that I had been given the wrong codebase or that there was some library being called into, to no avail. (We were using TextPad back then, no IDE.)

    And then I found it: AUTOLOAD. If you're not familiar, if you call a function that does not exist in Perl, then Perl will call a sub-routine called AUTOLOAD if you define one. In there you can do whatever you want and the developer who had written this particular system was parsing the function name to identify the database table and fields. So something like `set_customer_name` would set the `name` column of the `customer` table. It was both genius and horrifying.

  • by dmd on 12/19/24, 1:49 PM

    My then-girlfriend and I, kicking it O'Reilly style, 1996: https://i.imgur.com/PPmZs9P.jpeg

  • by pjmlp on 12/19/24, 1:12 PM

    Despite being famous for being a cryptic language, in most cases in UNIX world, the safest way to code was to do userspace stuff in Perl, and only if it really mattered, rewrite in C.

    This was more approachable in Perl, than Tcl or later Python, as Perl does expose most of UNIX API on its standard library in a more C like fashion.

    My Perl 5 camel book got a fair use back in the day.

  • by petesergeant on 12/19/24, 12:53 PM

    I’m 42, and learned Perl at 14. I’ve worked with some very large Perl systems, and love it. Yes, there’s bad Perl, but I’ve never really understood the hate for it. The testing ecosystem and culture and documentation culture are first rate. The tooling like Mojolicious, DBIx::Class, etc are super well done.

    These days I write TypeScript full-time, which I like, and there’s a lot I miss about Perl, while absolutely loving the types in TS. The few months I spent writing Python professionally didn’t convince me it was any simpler or better than Perl, and I quit that job to go back to writing in TS.

  • by mikeInAlaska on 12/19/24, 6:32 PM

    I love perl. I work with it every day still, 25 years later. I recently rewrote a cellular provisioning API in it to be fully object oriented.

    I do not write it to win an obfuscation contest. I like it to be read as easily as possible. It is a joy to watch the core objects of the system work together so cleanly.

  • by wodenokoto on 12/19/24, 5:00 AM

    I’m about to turn 40 and have been thinking if I should learn Perl or AWK or go with a “modern” solution for text wrangling on the command line.

    The general advice here seems to be “learn Perl while young”

  • by classichasclass on 12/19/24, 4:18 AM

    I learned Perl 4.036 for a university course (computational linguistics, appropriately enough) in 1996. That's ... more than half my life away.

  • by dpb001 on 12/19/24, 2:34 PM

    Back in the 90’s Perl was about the only scripting platform that gave you access to host commands and info as well as the ability to connect to databases running on that host. Part of bringing up a Solaris host for Oracle always started with a visit to sunfreeware.com to get a version of Perl compatible with the latest DBI/DBD and enhanced email CPAN modules. I abused the backtick feature heavily.

  • by jwilk on 12/19/24, 11:30 AM

  • by bm98 on 12/19/24, 4:02 PM

    That was a great talk! Notice how his entire career got launched from an internship at Tektronix. I love the bit about how he found his own troff macros in use at O'Reilly because a coworker had taken his code there years before -- and he appreciated that! One might say that the same kind of "80's hacker ethic" is what got him into trouble at Intel.

    The Camel book was so well-written. It was my introduction to Perl, which became my "superpower" in the 90's and far longer into the 2000's than I tend to admit. I eventually switched to Python because it's the closest thing that is considered an acceptable "modern" choice. I really enjoy Python too, but the obligatory XKCD about Python[1] rang true for me about Perl first.

    For me the #1 superpower strength of both languages is the first-class treatment and syntactic sugar for associative arrays (a.k.a. hashes, dictionaries).

    Perl did the same for regexes and file I/O; Python did not.

    I have come to appreciate Perl's backwards compatibility -- that old scripts still run unchanged -- though maybe that's largely because Perl 5 has been in maintenance mode for so long.

    [1] https://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/python.png

  • by wruza on 12/19/24, 7:28 AM

    Tbh, for me it was a source of regex knowledge, in retrospect. Remove regexes from perl, what’s left?

    I can name: dynamic scoping, implicit filehandles, implicit $_, strange contexts, keyword-like list functions. That’s basically it, and while it sounds fun, it doesn’t do much in a sense of code reduction.

    $. $? $$ etc, well you can split lines with .split('\n'), get status as a part of result, call os.getpid().

    <>, you can open() or createReadStream().

    $_ is just a kids toy. “print if /…/“. Cool.

    Lots of global modes under dynamic scoping is questionable. Value semantics and corresponding sigils are horrible, really. Bless is ugh. Subs are meh.

    It’s all just regex. Add regex as a language construct and you get the power of perl in it. /…/.test(s), s.match(/…/), s.replace(/…/, '$&') that’s 90% of Perl. Regex saves most lines of code, everything else is just esoteric extra that doesn’t do much. Also no GC.

  • by artemave on 12/20/24, 5:10 PM

    My brain inadvertently changed the title to My Perl Half Life

  • by cafard on 12/19/24, 4:27 PM

    I came here to say: not just text processing. Thirty-odd years ago I worked on a government contract supporting users of Data General minicomputers. From time to time we needed to inspect the logs, but the log reading utility was not fast. The log format was thoroughly documented, though, and it proved to be much faster to ship a log over to a Sun box and pick it apart with Perl using unpack.

  • by replwoacause on 12/19/24, 2:17 PM

    Any good reasons not to build web apps and API backends with Perl these days?

  • by romanobro56 on 12/19/24, 5:03 AM

    I can relate, I learned Perl when I was three and now I’m six.

  • by marcrosoft on 12/19/24, 3:35 PM

    I always think of Randal shwartz when I think of people saying, “I’m an X language programmer”. You don’t want to be the last guy on earth that’s the expert in a dead language.