Hacker News Reader

Huh, I worked at a company that wrote 1.5 million lines of perl together, and we never ended up with those problems. Maybe you picked the wrong co-workers? You can screw up in any language.

Yeah ... most of my 2-company-ago's software stack was written in Perl. Worked very well.

The specific example cited

while(<>){ $h{$_}++ && ... }

is quite understandable to anyone who has used Perl for more than a few weeks. Its a common pattern. Complaining about this, which is, for the uninitiated, looping over reading each line from STDIN until EOF, incrementing a hash variable indexed by each line, etc.

This is a very common pattern in perl. Draw your own conclusion as to whether complaining about idiomatic language from a "skilled practitioner" is something one should take without a grain or two of salt.

And of course, being Perl, there are many ... many ... ways to accomplish the same task. Leveraging CPAN modules. I'd leave discovering some of the as an exercise for the reader.

I have a decent amount of experience with Perl 5 and one of Perl's greatest features is also sometimes it's greatest liability, versatility. It's permissiveness tends to facilitate poor coding styles and methods which is why there's alot of bad Perl out there. Plus Perl 5 is just different for lack of a better term. If your proficient newer languages, Perl 5 and the Perl way of doing things probably seems a little strange.

It's different from the newer languages, it's different from the older languages, it's it's own thing. I find it really beautiful for that reason.

Who knew you could do that in a programming language? Not sure I would have ever thought to try.

I even love the above sample while loop, you can tell the person who posted it is good because they can't create too heinous an example. The <> and $_ provide what I think of as visual anchors that describe a path for the data to follow. Obviously some style minded author could do it better, but it's not bad. The real line noise is from the one-liners for systems tasks I think.

I totally agree, I didn't mean what I said in a negative way at all. That's how I got into Perl. What made it cool to me was just how different it was. It's experimental, esoteric and functional all at the same time depending on how you use it.

> while (<>) { ($h{$_}++ == 1) && push (@outputarray, $_); };

That's a business culture thing. If you set the expectation, that it's okay to do that, people might do that. If you set the expectation that it's not okay, people shouldn't.

The equivalent C and Python are likely just as ugly (given that the equivalent python might be using a far too complex range statement or put it on a single line using : and ;, which is possible...).

That said, as bad code goes, that's not really that bad. The only non-standard things are <> and $_, and if you don't know what those are, you really haven't done the minimum of learning about the language (<> might be somewhat exotic in that form depending on the codebase, but $_ is not something you can get way with not knowing about). In all, the major problem with it is that it's not commented and uses poor variable names, which is something every language needs to deal with. I would write it like so if I wanted it on a single line (but I would probably use 2-3 lines):

    # Report each duplicated line once
    my (%lineseen,@linedups); # This was required in yours too right? I assume you're using strict...
    while (<>) { (++$lineseen{$_}==2) && push(@linedups, $_); };

But I would likely opt for the following if doing it myself:

    # Report duplicate lines once
    my %lineseen;
    my @linedups = grep { ++$lineseen{$_}==2 } (<>);

Assuming I was using <>, which I generally don't since File::Slurp is usually available and clearer.

There's always <STDIN> if <> is too cryptic. I think what most fail to grok, if they've only glanced at Perl, is context. Above all Perl is a context-based language. It's the opposite of Python's spell-everything-out approach but just as valid. Perl also excels at whipupitude.

Except that <> isn't just <STDIN>, it reads from each line of each file specified as an argument on the command line or STDIN if no files were specified. This dual use (and magical-ness) is why I shy away from it in actual programs (but it is useful for one liners, which is why it does this), as it can be confusing.

Some people will look at this as evidence that Perl should be relegated to one-liners, but I find immense usefulness in combining my more engineered aspects with one-liners, and providing myself with a "project evaluator". What I do is create a simple bash script which just calls perl and sets the library include path to the project lib, includes a few useful things to always have (Path::Tiny, Try::Tiny, Data::Dumper, etc), and passed the rest of the args to Perl. Using DBIx::Class for SQL manipulation and/or using complex API client libraries I've written combined with the abilities of perl to do things easily as a one-liner is amazing.

<> is actually <ARGV>. And actually the least cryptic spelling IMO is "readline(*ARGV)" or just bare readline, which still compiles to the same opcodes. Sure, <> is more common, but it's easier to find what readline and ARGV mean.

File::Slurp is broken AF though, and obsoleted by File::Slurper since the original can't be fixed without breaking accidentally working code in the wild.

Still mostly fine so long as you know you're only dealing with 7-bit ASCII, IIRC, but Caveat Emptor.

Ah, well I actually use Path::Tony's slurp functionality mostly, depending on if it's already available in the project (which it is in any I set up).

It's easier to just say File::Slurp in mixed company so people immediately know what it is if they look it up, rather than them be confronted with a grab-bag of functions.

File::Slurper is just as immediately obvious, and happens to not be fundamentally misdesigned :) Path::Tiny is also great.

> while (<>) { ($h{$_}++ == 1) && push (@outputarray, $_); };

We use Perl::Critic [0] to deal with issues like that. It has enabled us to develop a very consistent style, and helps new devs adopt to it quite quickly.

[0] https://metacpan.org/pod/Perl::Critic

I've worked on large 20 year old Java and C applications (OLTP and batch processes) and I can assure you that they can be as ugly as any old Perl code you have dealt with.

Saying that I see absolutely nothing wrong with that perl code you are highlighting as being obtuse or ugly. Anyone who understands Perl should not have an issue with that line. It is clear and concise.

Well, the "foo && bar" is a bit of a bashism, idiomatic perl would do "bar if foo" or similar.

And a C-ism, and a C++-ism, and a Java-ism, and probably at least one other I'm not thinking of at the moment.

There are a variety of things that Perl programmers would consider idiomatic (depending, I would say, on the background of the Perl programmer). Using something like (foo && bar) in this manner is actually quite common in some Perl code bases (although, I suspect it is more commonly used where there are multiple conditions that are chained -- Damian Conway's "Perl Best Practices" book has some examples of those).

In the example given, I suspect the author of that code did it that way to reduce the length and put it on one line. I understand the desire for concise code, but if it were me, I would spread it out more to make it easier to read (mostly, I just wouldn't put it all on one line). I like having concise code also, but there is a fairly definite line that I try not to cross. If I have to work hard at all to keep track of the pieces, it's time to either add some more whitespace (horizontally or vertically, or sometimes both), change some of the constructs, or add some temporary variables to make the intent clear.

I am the person most likely to have to deal with the code a year later, so like many others, I try to not confuse my future self.

Seriously...? I last worked with Perl in college (more than a decade ago) and thats perfectly understandable to me. There is nothing un-readable about that code as long as you understand Perl conventions. The more important part regarding code quality was whether that piece of code was encapsulated into an independent function or a snippet of a wall of text.

You should see C++ Templates! Even the idiomatic examples in cppreference.com will blow up your head and require multiple re-reads.

Note that:

    while (<>) { ($h{$_}++ == 1) && push (@outputarray, $_); };

Would be written as the following in Raku:

    my @output-array = lines.unique;

Actually, since the Perl 5 example doesn't chomp (remove newlines), the Raku version would need to be:

    my @output-array = lines(:!chomp).unique;

where the `:!chomp` is a named parameter representing a `False` value for the named parameter `chomp`. AKA, `chomp => False`.