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Comment by mfontani | Hacker News Reader

I would strongly recommend you do learn Perl 5 (and Raku, and Haskell, and lua, and functional languages, and ...), even if only to be able to know enough about them to be enlightened about what each of them gets right and wrong.

For Perl 5, you could do worse than going through the _free_ "Modern Perl" book, at http://modernperlbooks.com/books/modern_perl_2016/

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Thanks for recommending this book. Mostly I write TypeScript day-to-day, so naturally I typically reach for nodejs when I want to "upgrade" a script from bash to a more expressive language in a cross-platform way. I've been frustrated with that tooling, however, for a whole bunch of reasons, at lot of it to do with how clunky nodejs actually is in shell pipelines. I've thought about reaching for python, but it has some similar issues to nodejs: you need a particular environment, and some things which ought to be natural in a shell environment just...aren't...in python. I think someone here suggested Lua, and I just...don't care for Lua (although I haven't tried it in a scripting-like context).

Anyhow, I've been reading this for a half-hour or so and I'm struck by how incredibly similar common Perl idioms feel to JavaScript as it is commonly used today. I think part of this familiarity has to do partly with type coercion, partly with destructing assignments, partly with function "context"(as in Perl) as it is commonly deployed in the nodejs ecosystem, partly because of the way default arguments and function passing relates to the default scalar variable in Perl.

I've been playing around with OCaml and Rust a bunch recently, but haven't had any good reason to reach for them "in real life." The fact that Perl is "everywhere" (much the way JavaScript is "everywhere" as a side effect of browsers being ubiquitous), means that I'm likely to start reaching for Perl instead of nodejs when I need to move beyond Bash. It really does seem to be the right tool for the job.

So, a hearty "thank you" for the recommendation.

Glad to hear you opted for adding another tool to your toolbox :)

You might find it amusing that "JavaScript: The Good Parts" directly inspired the "Modern Perl" book.

That is entertaining to know!

Thank you for writing this, it seems very well done so far. And thanks for also making it available in the way that you did: I almost certainly wouldn't have played with Perl today without your book, made effortlessly available on my e-reader via Pragmatic. I'm curious why it's not available in physical copy from Pragmatic? And I'm not confident about the correct "buy" link to use to properly support the book.

One sidenote that I hate to mention, but: I couldn't figure out how to open a PR for this or even email someone who would care, but I found a code-typo on the CPAN website: it's instruction to "install via App::cpanminus" and then use with "cpanm name::module" is...an unfortunate early typo on that site.

I'm curious why it's not available in physical copy from Pragmatic?

I believe it is:

https://pragprog.com/cart/add/skus?sku_id=821_820

I'm not confident about the correct "buy" link to use to properly support the book.

It's more valuable to me if you share and enjoy. I give away electronic versions so that it's useful, not to make money from the time I spent writing it.

I found a code-typo on the CPAN website

Is this the page you were reading?

https://cpan.metacpan.org/modules/INSTALL.html

It's not explained on that page, but the distribution App::cpanminus installs a program called cpanm, not cpanminus (as one would expect).

Huh. Yes, that's what I was talking about. But `cpanm` didn't end up anywhere in my path, and at the same time, `cpan Module::Name` successfully downloaded and installed modules that I could use.

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