Exploring Programming Language Architecture in Perl (2010)

billhails.net

57 points·3rdAccount··8 comments

I have used perl in lot of projects many years a ago and personally I was a big fan of it. I used perl to do lot of flat file and log processing, also had fun time building CGI based apps too. But I guess perl didn't transitioned from v5 to v6 fast enough and now lot of other programming languages have taken over.

Perl 5 and Perl 6 are different languages, not different versions of the same language. This was very unfortunate naming in the end because it perpetuates this view.

Perl 5 is still actively developed[0] and has a large community releasing modules[1]. I still <3 it.

[0]: http://www.cpan.org/src/README.html [1]: https://metacpan.org/recent

Personally I hate using Perl because there's a huge amount of syntax that is often context-sensitive. And CPAN modules often use inheritance when composition would be more appropriate, leading to situations where I have to totally re-implement something in order to slightly optimize it or change behavior.

That being said Perl was the first higher-level language I learned so it has a special place in my heart. And I learned to value a lot of the collection-processing capabilities of the language. But the fact that there's more than one way to do things creates a situation where understanding someone else's code requires you to know all the different ways to do something. And the only way to know how some stuff works is to read source code.

Perl 6 variant of this would be nice.

I agree :)

Specifically, this uses Perl 5 to write a Scheme interpreter. Great find!

<prev> to the cover page, there’s a PDF.

I would love a book like this about cpython

Reply on news.ycombinator.com