this post was submitted on 10 Sep 2023
65 points (93.3% liked)
Technology
59106 readers
4223 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related content.
- Be excellent to each another!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
Approved Bots
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
I write Perl at work. Supporting an actively developed Perl based application.
It’s honestly not that bad as a language, the biggest downside is that the ecosystem of libraries around it are often abandoned or outdated. The language isn’t perfect and it needs a bit of discipline to avoid creating unreadable code, but honestly it’s not as bad as its reputation might have you believe.
It has quite a few tricks and unexpected bits of flexibility that make it quite a bit more expressive than other languages - you can really craft nice compact, elegant code with it if you want to.
These days I use other languages too (Python, Ruby, JS, etc) but none of them quite match Perl for expressiveness.
Oh also it’s great for oneliners. That expressiveness can be abused for brevity in some really interesting ways.
The worst one I stumbled across while reading a colleagues script was the three separate namespaces for symbols of type scalar, array, and hash.
You mean the fact that you can have a hash called %foo, an array called @foo and a scalar called $foo all at the same time? I agree that's a weird choice and there's potential for insanity there, but it's pretty easy to just not do that...
20+ years of Perl experience and while Perl has a load of idiosyncrasies that make it harder to work with than other languages, I don't think that particular one has ever caused a significant problem.
Yes, exactly. Those definitions aren't clashing, so they must have separate namespaces.
I wouldn't do that either, but my colleage apparently did. So far I'm having a harder time reading perl than writing it.
The way it works is that there's a symbol table entry for "foo" which has a slot for a hash, scalar, array, glob, etc.
That leads to some super weird behaviour like, for example, if I declare a scalar, hash and array as "x":
You can access them all independently as you're aware:
But what's really going to bake your noodle is I can assign the "x" symbol to something else like this:
..and then the same thing works with z:
Oneliner if you want to try it:
Congratulations! You now know more about one of Perl's really weird internals than I'd wager most Perl programmers (I have literally never used any of the above for anything actually productive!)
Do you work for booking.com? Only place I've seen that advertises the fact they run on a perl codebase
Nope. But I know a bunch of people that do or have, and have interviewed several (it’s a pretty small sector!)