blogs.perl.org

Over the past 10-12 years, Perl has been getting some significant speed boosts, on the order of 30% overall. It is of course still a very slow language when compared to compiled languages, but I'll take it. https://blogs.perl.org/users/dimitrios_kechagias/2022/11/perl-performa… I still code in Perl a fair bit for work. One great improvement I have taken advantage of is subroutine arguments, rather than unpacking @_ at the head of each subroutine. It is much easier to tell what the sub expects, and if the caller passes the wrong number of args it is a compile time error. The main draw for me is that regex is built into the syntax of the language, and not a library. If the task requires a lot of pattern matching and string manipulation and speed isn't that critical, I reach for Perl.

> … strong typing … C … This is incorrect. Wikipedia specifies C’s typing discipline as “static, weak, manifest, nominal”, which isn’t great, but is at least in the right ballpark. “Strong” and “weak” are unhelpfully overloaded words. http://blogs.perl.org/users/ovid/2010/08/what-to-know-before-debating-…

One of the discussion was on the Perl blogs[1]. Most of the devs there are Perl 5 devs and they also decided against the name change. Perl 6 is the next iteration of Perl that has been redesigned from the ground up. Why should it bare a different name? Yes, the redesign took more than a decade and it's incompatible with Perl 5, but so is Python 3.6 compared to 2.7, albeit to a lesser extent. Even Perl 5.26 has changed a lot since 5.6. In fact the least common denominator is 5.10.1. Using older versions is discouraged since they're largely unsupported by the majority of CPAN modules. 1. http://blogs.perl.org

My personal favorite blog post on this topic: http://blogs.perl.org/users/ovid/2010/08/what-to-know-before-debating-…

These are really not great talks at all. The speaker doesn't seem to actually know much about Perl, and it seems like the flaws he's found have little to do with Perl, and more to do with just writing insecure code. See http://blogs.perl.org/users/joel_berger/2015/12/response-to-the-perl-j… for one response and some discussion in the comments.

I find that putting the method signature at the end of the method definition can become unreadable pretty fast. Also, the fact that it doesn't offer any performance improvement (most probably, this will actually degrade performance) makes me see this as a cool trick, but not really recommended in production. I like the aproach Perl 6 took on gradual typing. You can read about it in this article which computes fibonnaci's number:http://blogs.perl.org/users/ovid/2015/02/avoid-a-common-software-bug-b… The only reason I wait for the next winter to come is because Perl6 will be production ready by then as Larry Wall announced at FOSDEM this year.

I can wholeheartely recommend this tool. With tsan I found a lot of races in parrot threads, which I didn't detect in months before. Those were all real issues. http://blogs.perl.org/users/rurban/2012/08/threadsanitizer.html

As no-one else has mentioned it yet, here’s a link to a copy of Chris Smith’s excellent “What to know before debating type systems” article: http://blogs.perl.org/users/ovid/2010/08/what-to-know-before-debating-… If you’re at all interested in the real strengths and weaknesses of different kinds of type system but don’t yet have much experience in the field, this is a solid and impressively neutral starting point.

Related blog post: http://blogs.perl.org/users/stas/2012/12/cpan-module-recommendation-sy…

Great tips but this one in my opinion is pure gold http://blogs.perl.org/users/smylers/2011/08/ssh-productivity-tips.html

Absolutely. Perl on DotCloud was a huge success: no other service on our platform has seen such rapid and massive adoption! Perl hackers are much more experienced on average, they typically master more than one language, and they are extremely good at documenting and helping each other out [1] [2] [3]. [1] http://blogs.perl.org/users/leo_lapworth/2011/04/deploying-to-dotcloud… [2] http://onionstand.blogspot.com/2011/04/catalyst-in-cloud.html [3] http://blog.kraih.com/mojolicious-in-the-cloud-hello-dotcloud

Make sure to check out the followup to this article re Perl 6: http://blogs.perl.org/users/tyler_curtis/2010/08/age-discrimination-in… and the HN discussion: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1624027

And that still hasn't stopped the Perl 5 community from feelings of inferiority (see http://blogs.perl.org/users/ovid/2010/03/perl-5-is-dying-a-follow-up.h… for example), and more importantly it hasn't stopped Perl 6 from being built. Which is a shame, because I would much rather have seen something like Perl on Rails, or in any case work going towards building on all the stuff already there in CPAN instead of duplicating all that work in PHP and then Python and then Ruby and then maybe even Perl 6 sometime this decade.

I don't think pure freedom. As in a fully funded party for life would be ever possible without secure routine monthly income, taking care of you while you do whatever you feel like. Until then its just a trade off. A few days back I read a article: http://blogs.perl.org/users/ovid/2013/07/perl-startups-lacuna-expanse.… From the last paragraph: "Do not quit your day job. When you're starting your business, you need to make decisions from a position of strength. If you're making decisions because you're strapped for cash, you're almost certainly going to make the wrong decision. ..... if you haven't created new revenue streams by the time the previous ones dry up, you'll be right back at the problem of #1: making decisions based upon financial hardship rather than what's best for the business." This thing explains the true deal about freedom in our lives. Once you have all the money in the world to take care of you, you will have the freedom to experiment and fail without dying along the way. The key is financial freedom.

If it helps, I'm a real hacker :) Here's some of my open-source code: https://github.com/Ovid Here's some more of my open-source code: http://search.cpan.org/~ovid/ Here's my tech blog where I give advice to other hackers: http://blogs.perl.org/users/ovid/ I'm a hacker trying to help other hackers live their dreams and I give freely back to the community. > This is "Who's hiring" thread and it has always been a place for companies to post their own direct-hire positions. I realize that you disagree with recruiters being here. The lead paragraph for the "Who is Hiring" threads says the following: > Please lead with the location of the position and include the keywords INTERN, REMOTE, or H1B if the corresponding sort of candidate is welcome. Feel free to post any job that may interest HN readers from executive assistant to machine learning expert to CTO. I've never seen anything which states "no recruiters". We specifically looked for that because we didn't want to violate any TOS or alienate those we are trying to help. I'm sorry you disagree with how we've handled this, but we honestly do try to help people live anywhere in the world. The fact that I've also been writing a blog helping people do this for years should help back that up. When candidates contact us with their CV and express an interest in the jobs, we immediately tell them who is hiring and why. It's hard enough for those who dream of living abroad to find companies willing to help them. Why restrict…

I was a Perl lover once. And now it seems I understand the haters. Just don't use Perl. The language seems fine, productive, even sublime at first but you will encounter some horrible design features. Just read the following, http://markmail.org/message/h2spyi5za4qheuft -- Perl's data structure serialization is leaky. Thought you made an int ? Whoa ... serialized as a string. http://blogs.perl.org/users/rurban/2013/02/no-indirect-considered-harm… -- A language feature causing a burnout ? Well fuck me ! That's just a tip of the iceberg. PHP, a fractal of bad design ? Perl, a quantum bomb, waiting to tick off. The Modern Perl movement is like saying "I'll close my eyes and crime ceases to exist." No best practices will save you from broken language features. The people who maintain Perl source code, are not a _fan_ of Modern Perl. They won't make "strict" the default or introduce signatures or better OOmodel. The people who proclaim "Modern Perl" won't fork. Even this release shows how clueless Perl maintainers are ! * They released a switch statement long long back * And now they mark it even as "experimental" because of the leaky "my $_" scope. Oh God ! I will never emotionally invest in another tool. EDIT: Neutral language.

> To turn the question on its head, why should anyone choose Perl over the alternatives? I honestly have never seen a reason to switch. Was that the implication of the original statement? When you said you didn't see much reason for a new project to be started in Perl, I took that as any new project, even in a shop that has prior Perl experience, not a project where you are specifically looking for something different than our prior language. Indeed, if you are already using one of Perl/Python/Ruby, I'm not sure I see a reason to switch from any one of those to any other. If on the other hand you actually meant "When starting a new project, I see no reason to use Perl regardless of whether that's where you have experience", then we still have a discussion worth having. > 1. Community : there's no doubt Perl's community has taken a bit of a hit over the last n years population wise. In addition, the Perl community has, anecdotally, a reputation for being a bit terse [1]. Nothing cut and dry here, but again nothing that stands out IMHO. Did you actually read that link, or just read a section title and assume it made your point? Because the author updated that section saying that he really can't talk much on that point, because he wasn't there, and the evidence shows it to have been fairly civil. That said, Sebastian does have a bit of a reputation for being "terse". But that's one person. Since when does one person define a whole community? > 2. Libraries : by…

> Not by me. I make no assumptions on the matter at all, the entire topic never even crosses my mind...This is a common complaint? I've never even noticed the gender of someone contributing an article. Who are these people who tally these things up? Anextio was pointing out the the tech industry is sexist, not trying to call you in particular sexist. It's cool that you make no assumptions if that's the case (although, to be honest I find that a bit unbelievable since you think the tech industry doesn't suffer from sexism), but that doesn't change the tech industry. > And you call me sexist? And how do you know if the author is male or female anyway? There are links (e.g. http://blogs.perl.org/users/steven_haryanto/2012/07/so-apparently-this… that show that the author is male. > You are aware that discriminating for women on good things is just as sexist as doing it for bad things, right? I don't see where you got the idea that anextio was doing anything other than pointing out that women in the tech community don't get the credit they deserve. > Because that's how English grammar works. So it's suddenly not sexist to assume that the author of an anonymous blog is male? (Just to clarify: I don't mean sexist as in 'I'm out to systematically repress all women!', I mean the follow-the-leader sexist as in 'it's okay to x because everyone else does it.') 'He', unfortunately, isn't a gender-neutral pronoun. > I don't get why gender even matters for these…

> also, it seems like everything in perl is a string? It's actually somehow even worse than this. The Perl type system is honestly ridiculous. Most veteran Perl developers don't fully understand it. https://blogs.perl.org/users/leon_timmermans/2025/02/a-deep-dive-into-… is a good introduction.

Here’s a nice article which uses this feature well (and several others) while computing e <https://blogs.perl.org/users/damian_conway/2019/09/to-compute-a-consta… An example: #| Dörrie's bounds assess -> \x=(1,10,100...10⁶) { ½ × sum (1 + x⁻¹)**(x), (1 + x⁻¹)**(x+1) }

They gave up on that plan. https://blogs.perl.org/users/psc/2022/05/what-happened-to-perl-7.html

Sort of. It caused a kerfuffle, and so it was decided to continue with 5.x until there's a big enough change to make the jump (and who knows if any such change will ever come). Quote: "At some point in the future, the PSC may decide that the set of features, taken together, represent a big enough step forward to justify a new baseline for Perl. If that happens, then the version will be bumped to 7.0." https://blogs.perl.org/users/psc/2022/05/what-happened-to-perl-7.html

FastMail runs on Perl: https://blogs.perl.org/users/neilb/2019/09/fastmail-and-perl-an-interv…

Looks like that plan was abandoned: https://blogs.perl.org/users/psc/2022/05/what-happened-to-perl-7.html

I actually did make a quick search to see if I was blowing hot air, and found this blog post that shows a bunch of benchmarks over time with a fairly typical Raku/Perl flavored text processing task, and it was taking 0.23s for the July 2022 release vs. 0.59s in Jan 2016 [1]. So that's a pretty impressive improvement--3x over 6 years--but I remember Raku being numbers like 4x or 5x slower than Python on benchmarks from the last few years, so by my very sloppy math it's still got to speed up by at least 2x or 3x to go to match Python. It's also possible that there has been a ton of speedup in the last year-and-a-half since that benchmark, or it's not representative, but that's where I got the idea from. [1] https://blogs.perl.org/users/sylvain_colinet/2023/01/benchmarking-raku…

> raku is perl 6 It used to be, but not anymore. It has grown to be its own thing with some happenstance parenthood through being born from an early attempt at Perl 6, and thus is now only being slightly more related to Perl than e.g Ruby is. Ok I'm pushing it but you get the idea: taking a biological analogy, it has mutated away far enough that it is now considered to be its own strain. And if that helps clear some doubts, Perl 7 is on the table (if there ever needs to be a Perl 7): At some point in the future, the PSC may decide that the set of features, taken together, represent a big enough step forward to justify a new baseline for Perl. If that happens, then the version will be bumped to 7.0. https://blogs.perl.org/users/psc/2022/05/what-happened-to-perl-7.html So Raku cannot be Perl 6!

I presume this statement from May 25 is still valid: https://blogs.perl.org/users/psc/2022/05/what-happened-to-perl-7.html

At work we moved from AWS to GCP for pricing reasons. We are still paying loads more than before moving to the cloud, but it's hard to find good sysadmins nowadays that don't want to do everything on the cloud. For personal projects I've moved things to Linode and Digital Ocean, as they provide quite decent value. Actually, for a comparison of AWS/GCP/Azure/Linode/DO/Tencent/Ali value & performance, check out an extensive comparison I ran recently: http://blogs.perl.org/users/dimitrios_kechagias/2022/03/cloud-provider…

There was no admitting to themselves. There was the personal realization that the two factions in what was then the Perl community, would never see eye to eye on what the language called "Perl 6" was. And that all of my efforts of reconciliation, such as the Perl Reunification Summit http://blogs.perl.org/users/gabor_szabo/2013/02/perl-reunification-sum… had been in vain. Which lead me to open an issue https://github.com/Raku/problem-solving/issues/81 which in the end resulted in the rename to the Raku Programming Language https://raku.org .

> No, the reason we went with go was because golang’s packaging is so much better than node. Or java. Or C#. We get a single binary. Building is as easy as: `go build` This is only true insofar as you have an extended group of collaborators committed to observing the fundamental tenets[1] that make this work. Not hard to run into (popular!) software written in Go that is as bereft of this simplicity as the other ecosystems the author compares to. (Interestingly, Docker itself is the product of minds that were exposed to Go, and yet these principles didn't "take" in that case...) 1. http://blogs.perl.org/users/leon_timmermans/2020/08/perl7-is-a-fork-of…