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Comment by hangonhn | Hacker News Reader

I loved Perl when I first learned it. I loved it for the same reason I love Python now. It's very easy to express ideas I have in mind without worrying about the details. It's a great prototyping (as in prototyping ideas, not as in the type system) language. It was my introduction to "higher level" languages. That said, Perl suffers from having too many magical operators that makes it hard to reason about a snippet of code. I feel Python strikes the right balance.

Your comparison to Javascript is apt but I think a lot of us also find Javascript to be a bit of a horror. Recently I learned that Javascript doesn't handle modulus on a negative number correctly among other things.

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Perl suffers from having too many magical operators that makes it hard to reason about a snippet of code.

Certainly a matter of personal preference, but a sprinkling of operators isn't so bad once you're acquainted with the language. Yes it's possible to weave a mess in perl, but most of the time you're just dealing with code that might have a few sigils preceeding an identifier, not ASCII soup.

I'd say the real issue is weak typing (implicit conversions between primitives, using strings for many things where some more specialized data type would have been more appropriate) and variable scope problems. These can lead to hard to locate bugs. Worse is the culture in the perl community of manipulating the VM's internals and generating code at runtime and all kinds of other extremely dynamic behaviors. It's amazing what perl lets you accomplish there, but when some package you got off CPAN does something weird and then something goes wrong, it can get really weird.

Recently I learned that Javascript doesn't handle modulus on a negative number correctly among other things.

That's not really true. Javascript doesn't have a modulus operator, it has a remainder operator, and it is completely valid as a remainder operator. The "%" operator is usually called the modulus operator, but it originated in C where prior to C99 its behavior on signed integers was undefined, and on signed integers modulo and remainder are equivalent. So javascript didn't want undefined behavior so they picked one definition and ran with it, it just so happens that C99 chose the other definition and it stuck.

I'm interested in the details of the variable scoping problems are. I'd have thought that perl's explicit declaration of lexicals with 'my' was better than "declare at first use" of javascript/python/ruby.

[There's a class of mistake where you typo a variable name which you can make in those languages which gets caught in a language where you have to declare variables.]

I share your confusion over that assertion. I actually miss Perl's excellent block scope capabilities when working in almost every other similar language. I imagine most other languages have gotten it, by now, but a few years ago when I was using Python for a few years for a client it didn't have block scope and I missed it. A brief googling actually hints that maybe Python still doesn't have block scope, which is pretty weird, so I assume I'm googling wrong.

But, perhaps discussion of scope problems in Perl is just when talking about very old code. Perl had some scope atrocities back in Perl 4 and some weirdness in early Perl 5 days. But, for the past 15 years or so, it's been very predictable and has improved (like the syntactic sugar of "my" declarations in foreach or while expressions).

I seem to recall that Python not only didn't (doesn't?) have block scope, it tended (tends?) to produce a completely, blithely cryptic error message when the programmer assumes that it does have proper block scope and writes a program that fails as a result. Discovering that was memorable.

Python 3 has changed the "standard" traceback to be more readable and include more information, maybe that one is more to your liking: http://blog.ionelmc.ro/2014/08/03/the-most-underrated-featur...

One weirdness I encountered recently with nested functions:

  sub a {
    my $v;
    sub b {
      # captures only the first
      # instance of $v
    }
  }

This is because named subroutines are created once and variable captures are resolved at that time. I expected the more normal capture semantics you get with anonymous subs, like

  sub a {
    my $v;
    my $b = sub {
      # a new $b each time
      # captures each $v
    }
  }

Thanks - useful point. But, I think that's more of an oddity of nested, named subs than anything else. The usual anonymous subs close as you'd expect (as you say).

The lexical scoping rules are precisely what causes this behaviour. The first example defines a nested function which has access to the variables in scope when defined (as you remark).

It's little different than this block defined outside of any function:

  {
  my $v;

  sub b { ... }
  }

Whereas an anonymous function is "defined" each time the enclosing scope is evaluated.

For more info, see: http://www.perlmonks.org/?node_id=389319

HTH

> most of the time you're just dealing with code that might have a few sigils preceeding an identifier

I personally like sigils but, afaict, one can almost eliminate sigils in Perl 6 if one wants to.

Instead of $ sigil on scalar (single item) variables:

    a scalar =$= 42; # uses a fictional feature [1]

    say scalar;
    # 42

    scalar--; # decrement scalar

    scalar.say;
    # 41

Instead of % sigil on dicts (hashes):

    a dict =%= pi, i, e, now;

    say dict;
    # 2.71828182845905 => Instant:1435371876.325275,
    # 3.14159265358979 => 0+1i

    dict<pi>--;

    say dict.invert;
    # Instant:1435371876.325275 => 2.71828182845905
    # -1+1i => 3.14159265358979

Instead of @ on lists (arrays):

    a list =@= 10,20;

    say list >>+>> scalar;
    # 51 61

> I'd say the real issue is weak typing

In Perl 6 everything is (implicitly) nominally typed. One can optionally add explicit nominal type info.

It's certainly not HoTT and it has weaknesses that look unlikely to be addressed this year[2] but it's also one of the most advanced gradual typing implementations in any language.[3]

> implicit conversions between primitives

In Perl 6 conversions are generally explicit. If you name a couple implicit conversions in Perl 5 we could compare with Perl 6 (and, say, Python).

> using strings for many things where some more specialized data type would have been more appropriate

Can you provide an example?

> variable scope problems.

Scope features are very much a Perl 6 strength.

Again, perhaps describe a scenario where it's a weakness in Perl 5 and we can compare with Perl 6 and perhaps other langs?

> manipulating the VM's internals

The "reference" Rakudo Perl 6 compiler is a front-end to the NQP compiler toolchain. The NQP toolchain targets several VMs including the JVM. It does not manipulate the JVM's internals!

(NQP also targets MoarVM[4] but it uses the same principled ways to communicate with MoarVM that it does with the JVM.)

> and generating code at runtime and all kinds of other extremely dynamic behaviors.

Ah yes. Perl 6 has upped the ante on that. It is statically compiled in a lot of ways but it also has very powerful dynamic features, carefully designed. [5]

----

[1] I made up the term 'a'. In reality it's 'constant'. But that name is kinda surprising for the purposes to which I've put it -- the terms it declares aren't very constant! But 'constant' is much longer than 'a' and this sort of declaration is supposed to be harder than using other scopes such as 'my' or 'has'. See http://irclog.perlgeek.de/perl6/2015-06-27#i_10812609 and following for a tiny bit more discussion.

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9771718

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gradual_typing

[4] http://moarvm.org

[5] See this example and my comment about static/dynamic aspects of Perl 6 interop: http://www.reddit.com/r/perl6/comments/399o82/python_matplot...

> [lang X] doesn't handle [basic math] correctly among other things.

From a recent talk[1], what are x, y, z in the following?

    x       =  7 ÷ 2;
    y       = -7 ÷ 2;
    z       = .1 + .2 - .3

    x    y     z

    3.5  -3.5  0             # human

    3    ?     tiny number   # c89; ? depends on compiler
    3    -4    tiny number   # ruby 
    3    -4    tiny number   # python 2/3    
    3    -3    0             # bc    
    3.5  -3.5  tiny number   # perl5
    3.5  -3.5  0             # perl6

----

It isn't just basic math.

How "long" is the following string?

    ปฏิบัติจริง

    7 characters              # human

    len("ปฏิบัติจริง")    = 33    # python 2
    len("ปฏิบัติจริง")    = 11    # python 3
    "ปฏิบัติจริง".length  = ?     # ruby

(For Ruby, I've found "the core language does not provide a way to count [human perceived characters]". [3] Is that still correct or out of date?)

----

> Perl suffers from having too many magical operators that makes it hard to reason about a snippet of code. I feel Python strikes the right balance.

To quote Larry Wall, "Perl 6 ... has been rethought and rebalanced on every level".[4]

It might be interesting for you to pick a couple Perl 5 operators that you consider too magical; then we could look at the merits and demerits of those ops in Perl 5 and their equivalents in Python and Perl 6.

> It's very easy to express ideas I have in mind without worrying about the details [of Python, now, and Perl, back in the day]

This, of course, has explicitly been a deliberate focus of all the Perls. Part of the point of Perl 6 was to remove the bits in Perl 5 that were problematic (including some "too cute/weird" stuff) and to introduce much nicer higher level abstractions (eg grammars instead of just regexes[5]).

----

I've long encountered vocal folk who underestimate or misunderstand Larry Wall and Perl to an absurd degree. Perl has been focused for over two decades on making it easy to get the right results when doing basic practical things (like integer division and counting characters) and, imo, that ought to be obvious to anyone who looks at the matter carefully.

----

[1] http://www.slideshare.net/Ovid/perl-6-for-mere-mortals and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lpu-3UF_b48

[2] http://www.reddit.com/r/perl/comments/2szv7m/beginner_progra...

[3] http://unicode-programming.readthedocs.org/en/latest/count-c...

[4] http://www.infoworld.com/article/2882300/perl/perl-creator-l...

[5] https://github.com/moritz/json/blob/master/lib/JSON/Tiny/Gra...

Wow. This is such a fantastic comment; I am very impressed.

I think my experience with Perl ended at Perl 5 so my comment is a bit dated but the sentiment stayed with me, which I admit is unfair.

I also forgot to give Perl credit for another thing: introduction to regex.

Perl was a great language for me to learn and I should revisit my sentiments about it.

> I think my experience with Perl [is] a bit dated

In some ways, contemporary Perl 5 (eg this year's 5.22 release) is quite unlike older Perl 5s. For example Moose -- which first arrived in 2005 -- is a powerful and relatively clean OO and "roles" system which has matured in to a huge ecosystem of its own within CPAN. (It was/is a kind of back port of the Perl 6 OO model which itself built upon the notions found in systems such as CLOS.[1])

But my personal focus is Perl 6.

> I also forgot to give Perl credit for another thing: introduction to regex.

Perl 6 unifies "regexes", PEGs, and lexical closures. [2].

> Perl was a great language for me to learn and I should revisit my sentiments about it.

Anyone who joins the freenode IRC channel #perl6 and says hi will be welcomed.[3] If you visit, feel free to paste a link to my comment. :)

----

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_Lisp_Object_System

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perl_6_rules

[3] https://kiwiirc.com/client/irc.freenode.net/perl6 (today's log at http://irclog.perlgeek.de/perl6/today)

Someone just pointed out that I missed a line in the bit about string length:

    "ปฏิบัติจริง".chars   = 7     # Perl 6

And someone else just pointed out that the python line should instead be the two lines:

    3    -4    tiny number   # python 2
    3.5  -3.5  tiny number   # python 3

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