Perl 5.30.0 documentation site | Hacker News Reader

Perl 5.30.0 documentation site

perldoc.perl.org

68 pointskamaal23 comments

in firefox on windows, it looks like the top banner is covering up the scrollbar buttons.

seems like they set the content div to 100vh/100vw with fixed positioning and floated the header on top. hard to imagine why they would do this, it can cause a lot of things (like scrolling) to break subtly.

See also https://perldoc.pl, which has a search function, working links on indiviudual functions pages and includes all manual pages (for example, it doesn't omit perlandroid).

Documentation is great here and super readable. Will definitely play around with Perl again.

The fork icon on mobile is kind of annoying. Like I'd fork anything on mobile, right.

I think you meant to respond to the parent?

Looks great and very readable too. Lots of examples in the tutorials with nice formatting makes it more pleasurable (e.g. see the tutorial on regex[0]).

[0]: https://perldoc.perl.org/5.30.0/perlretut.html

Is it just me, or is the site "faster" than most?

Bet it's static or server-side rendered, and not running much JS in either case. Every time I've been surprised at the speed of a site in the last few years it's been static or some old-school server-side stuff—even PHP. All our "modern" web stacks are embarrassingly bloated and require heroic effort to be as fast as "bad" old tech.

It is static rendered HTML. But https://perldoc.pl is dynamically rendered (it is a Mojolicious app) and the difference is not noticeable to me except on huge pages. perldoc.perl.org before the refresh was already static HTML but very slow. I think there is a lot more to it than deployment strategy.

I noticed snappiness on perldoc.pl as well. Fantastic!

Bet you're right.

The great majority of the site's content is pulled from POD docs that come with the Perl distro. No reason to convert that at every request. I wouldn't be surprised if most of the tooling to make Perldoc is on CPAN already.

Dude, it is fast! wuh?

A lot cleaner & more modern than what was previously there, that's for sure.

Does seem a bit of a bug though which one of my colleagues noticed. If you disable JavaScript the content seems to get overlapped by the navigation bar. There's some JS to fix some of the styling.

Would probably be better if the header/nav was just static or got more compact as you scrolled down the page.

I'm a JS dev but for a static site it shouldn't need JS to be readable.

Side note: The perldoc is my favourite programming language documentation. It's well written, with pleasant examples, and really not so much API focussed but on concepts. I read it in 2007 when I learned perl (Perl5). An amazing language at that time.

It truly is still an amazing language, to me. It's fallen out of favor as a valid language for most tasks, and trends seem to dictate a lot of what is used these days, especially in the web development world.

Perl 5 is likely what you learned in 2007, it's what I learned in 2001, and it's the same Perl now.

To all: Perl 5 is still a wonderful language with a lot of unique and distinct features, and I highly recommend giving it an honest try if you haven't. You probably won't want to replace your favorite language, though maybe you'll see things just a bit differently, which in my experience is always a good thing.

Here's a n00b but honest question: what is the current "best practice" method of managing Perl versions on macOS? Does Perl have anything comparable to pyenv or rbenv, or do people generally use perlbrew?

There are at least two solutions, perlbrew[1] and plenv[2]. Personally, I prefer perlbrew.

[1] - https://perlbrew.pl

[2] - https://github.com/tokuhirom/plenv

I always use plenv for this.

Not specifically related to your question, but carton is also a must: https://metacpan.org/pod/Carton

Yeah, after installing it earlier today and using it for the first time plenv makes sense to me because I'm also using shims over in pyenv- and rbenv-land, so I set it up like this:

  $ echo 'eval "$(plenv init - zsh)"' >> ~/.zshrc

There's a consistency to them all doing essentially the same thing on my rig (i.e. instead of exporting shell functions to switch PATH).

We use plenv after trying perlbrew. It's shell based, doesn't require perl. The Perl-Build plugin does, however. It has straightforward documentation and creates shims instead of relying on aliases.

Nixpkgs supports multiple versions of Perl and allows you to use them side-by-side.

perlbrew works great for me, never had a reason to seek a different solution

congratulations -- now (s/github/git/) and its great !

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