Please describe those uniquely bad aspects of Perl that other scripting languages aren't.
730 karma · joined August 4, 2022
Maybe because I knew C and some bash and awk, Perl wasn't alien to me at all.
Coming from a Pascal and Java background, it was a breath of fresh air. Programming was actually fun.
I've not found colleagues who learned Java or C# first have had trouble learning Perl. When they've learned "modern" Perl with Moose/Moo, they've been happy with it.
This is a good thing, because it means that we don't have to worry about a program running on one implementation vs another.
Also, one of the things that Perl is great for (unlike many other scripting languages) is backwards compatibility. A program written in the 1990s for Perl 5.004 will probably run with minimal modifications on Perl v5.36.
At $work, we're sticking with Perl [reasons elsewhere in this thread]. But if we were going start projects in other languages, it would probably be Python or Node.
For personal projects, I'm more interested in Rust than Raku.
The Perl interpreter has been regular updated and improved. There's a new release of Perl every six months, and the libraries on CPAN provide access to various other kinds of technology and tooling.
At my $work, most of our code is in Perl, roughly a half-million lines of it dating back to the mid-1990s.
There's no point in rewriting it in something else, since the cost in resources to do that would outweigh the potential salary savings by hiring cheaper programmers who know Python or C# or whatever. (My experience with some other companies is that they want to move away from Perl because Perl programmers are more expensive, not because it's a worse language.)
Likewise, there's no point in starting new projects in another language since we'd then have to hire people people competent in both of those languages.
My experience is that people who turn their nose up at "old" tech like Perl are not worth hiring. If they don't care to learn about the technology you are using, then they won't care to learn about your industry or your company's business logic.
I really mistrust newspaper articles about new scientific discoveries, especially since they are often based on press releases from a university's PR department, and the PR department will often get the science wrong (because they are PR people, not scientists).
Or a service provider like a mobile carrier or cable company.
> ... terms of processes, design principles, work-life balance, compensation. Are things better now than they were back then?
We didn't have an official process or follow any design principles. There were small teams so we simply had a spec but we'd release things in stages and regularly meet with clients.
I had a decent work-life balance, a decent salary but wasn't making the big dot.com income that others were making.
I think overall things are better, technology-wise as well as some awareness of work-life balance, and more people are critical of the industry.
The technology is more complicated, but it does a lot more. The simplicity was largely due to naivety.
By 1995 I started dabbling with websites, and within a couple of years was working mostly with Perl CGI and some Java, on Windows and Linux/NetBSD.
Most of my work was on Windows, so that limited the available Perl libraries to what would run on ActiveState's Perl.
I gave up trying to do freelance because too many people didn't seem to understand the cost and work involved in writing software:
- One business owner wanted to pay be US $300 to fix some warehouse management software, but he'd up it to $500 if I finished it in one month.
- A guy wanted to turn his sports equipment shop into an e-commerce website, and was forward thinking... except that none of his stock of about 20,000 items was in a database and that he could "only afford to pay minimum wage".
I interviewed with some companies, but these people were clueless. It seems like a lot of people read "Teach yourself Perl in 7 days and make millions" books. The interview questions were basically "Can you program in OOP with Perl?".
I got a proper developer job on a team, eventually. They were basically happy that I could write a simple form that queried stuff from a database.
Some other people on my team used Visual Basic and VBScript but I avoided that like the plague. I recall we had some specialized devices that had their own embedded versions of BASIC that we had to use.
When Internet Explorer 4 came out that we started having problems making web sites that worked well on both.
Web frameworks didn't exist yet, JavaScript was primitive and not very useful. Python didn't seem to be a practical option at the time.
It dates back to CP/M days.
That's nonsense.
If a billionaire ended up destitute and anonymous without their connections, living in the street, they'd lack a lot of the knowledge about survival that many poor people have.
The only thing going for them might be if they are manipulative psychopaths and can get other people to do things for them. But I don't don't see how that is any better morally than getting a ”handout”.
Seriously, if you are living on the street with only the clothes on your back, how are you going to "create wealth"?
The QR menu is just a PDF of the printed menu.
When spending money is equated with speech, and corporations are given the same free speech rights as people, and you allow anonymous shell corporations... You end up with a corrupted government.
Also, if you are dining with someone who has a food allergy, then all the "convenience" of online menusgoes away when a waiver has to bring their book of allergens to the table and manually take the order anyway.
It's really important to report thibgs lime this to the developers and owners of the software.
Life is too short to waste your free time being somewhere that you don't want to be.
(It's also easier to change a "no" to a "yes" later, then to change from a "yes" to a "no".)
Your job is there to subsidize what you want to do with your life.
The system (like in most countries) failed to detect that new and potentially virus was circulating for months.
The system failed in encouraging people to take precautions. A significant portion of the population, mostly associated with Republican party, fought against things like mask mandates and social distancing and ended up actively spreading the virus and making the pressures on the health care system worse.
The health care system in the US has been a failure even before the pandemic.
So rather than a constructive report that looks into how the system can be improved before the next pandemic, they'd rather point fingers at a lab.
> This investigation’s interim report concludes that SARS-CoV-2 and the resulting COVID-19 global pandemic was, more likely than not, the result of a research-related incident associated with coronavirus research in Wuhan, China.
I can't help but think this is political. It's easy to blame a lab in China than to address failures of Western public health systems.
The commercial television network that broadcasts the shows is paid by commercials.
And TV networks don't like commercial skipping, e.g. https://www.techdirt.com/2012/05/25/tv-networks-file-legal-c...
But the problem isn't the presence of ads. It's that the ads are served by advertising networks, that track users across multiple websites and build profiles of users.
And that the original websites have very little control over the content of the ads, which may be irrelevant or contain malware.
The ads are often animated images, sometimes with sound, which are distracting.
The ads are often deceptive ("Your computer is infected. Install this program now!") or clickbait.
Some sites don't distinguish the ads from the content, which makes it confusing.
If you want a blast from the past, disable the popup blocker on your web browser and see how many sites still fill your screen with intrusive popups and notifications.
Also, people have used video recordings of live television to skip commercials. Some devices even have a commercial skip function. Or people just mute the television while commercials are playing. If this is acceptable, then why not block ads on websites?