Perl is 25 years old today

http://perldoc.perl.org/perlhist.html

by kamaal • 14 years ago

260 130 14 years ago

perldoc.perl.org

frozenport2• 14 years ago

This one is a real perl see --

                           |
                          \|/

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/7617852/whats-the-differe...

meaty2• 14 years ago

I vomited a little when I read that :)

RyanMcGreal• 14 years ago

I was going to downvote your comment, but then I clicked through and read the linked question and commentary.

kamaal6• 14 years ago

Did get the point of your comment, are you are trying to convey that you have problems with the Perl philosophy- "There is more than one way to do it(TIMTOWTDI)"?

frozenport2• 14 years ago

1. Yes 2. I also don't like that their naming convention doesn't reflect functionality. How would you assign carp, cluck, croak and confess functions?

3amOpsGuy5• 14 years ago

Before i switched to Python as my general purpose language, i used to be a bit of a Perl fanatic.

I've still to come across a language that lets you get your ideas down as quickly. It's full of fantastic time savers, e.g. the for(<>) construct and the format output functionality cover a bunch of common use cases in minimal keystrokes (let me pipe in some data, analyse it, then spit it out in a clean report).

It can hurt readability but for small one offs, it often doesn't matter.

ryporter• 14 years ago

I'm in a similar boat. I've largely switched to Python as my scripting language (except for one-liners), but I'll still defend Perl against those who dismiss it out of hand. After using it an Amazon, I've seen firsthand how productive one can be with the language; and, if you're careful (following, e.g., the guidelines in "Perl Best Practices" by Conway) it's very possible to write maintainable code as well.

gvalkov2• 14 years ago

I hear you on the one-liners issue. Python is unhelpful when it gets to that - there are no -n, -p, -l switches or special variables like there are in Perl and Ruby.

It's a shame really, since all the building blocks needed to implement a useful mode for writing one-liners are there. In fact, I have a work in progress module that tries to address this issue: https://github.com/gvalkov/python-oneliner

dalke• 14 years ago

Have you looked at APL or its derivatives like J and K? For certain types of work, and with experience, it's very terse and expressive.

3amOpsGuy5• 14 years ago

J, now there's a language! The C source is written in a J like style: a wall of ascii punctuation interspersed with single char identifiers.

It looks like a fantastically expressive language, but i fear the learning curve would be too steep for my time invested to pay off - others would have to spend the same time to learn it as well, negating any code sharing / reuse in my org (we don't use J).

brcrth• 14 years ago

So why you moved to Python?

3amOpsGuy5• 14 years ago

Good question.

I found others i had to share code with weren't as interested as me about writing maintainable perl code - i got really fed up with a patch work of "write only" perl scripts performing useful functions in prod. From DB maintenance tasks to general housekeeping, to work-arounds for prod app issues that never got prioritised for strategic fixes.

I found in practice python code produced by most others was easier maintained: it seemed to more or less force people to write more readable and therefore, maintainable code.

I also viewed the fact that Python was one of the premier languages across so many problem domains (Systems, DB, GUI, Web, Large data, GPU, etc.) as being a sure fire payoff for any time invested in it.

In environments this size it's not any one persons actions dictate what becomes the status quo: different groups will have different agendas and therefore priorities and views. I guess i was lucky that everyone else was either willing to give Python a go, or was easily convinced.

FWIW over the past few years it's proven to be a good choice for us. There are still O'Reilly books float about, esp between the newcomers but there's no zealous "where's my camel book!" shouts anymore.

anonymous• 14 years ago

I'm actually the reverse. I went to perl from python. I usually use it for system scripting and what I like about it is that it replaces bash nicely without removing the power of specialized syntax. I find it much easier to type open("program -args |") than to construct a subprocess object in python and manually extract lines from its output. On the other hand, python is pretty handy for larger programs, more than a few screens of dense perl syntax starts getting hard on the eyes.

ajross2• 14 years ago

My experience is almost exactly the opposite. Whenever I'm writing in Python I can't escape the feeling that the code is simply fragile due to missing language features. Obviously this starts with all the regex initializations (often quite distant in source from where they are applied) which make regular expressions in python just a huge mess.

Perl's autovification allows me to build a data structure at parse time with code that is trivially verifiable. Python forces me to sprinkle the code with a thousand tests for whether or not the field is initialized yet, or write extra code to define things like defaultdict instances (with syntax that I always have to look up, and which in my experience most python programmers don't understand).

Not to mention that if I want to use an OO syntax for that data structure I have to write extra code defining a class for it (and inevitably be yelled at by the pythonista security branch for all the __whatnot__ methods I forgot to define).

Python's comprehension/generator syntax is nice, though, and doesn't have a clean analog in perl. One thing it does do well is chaining up "filter" operations on aggregate data structures in a clean way. And that has value and is worth emulating. But honestly most of the rest of the language is junk compared to perl or ruby.

hercynium• 14 years ago

For list comprehensions and a different style of generator, look at https://metacpan.org/module/List::Gen

And then there are a pile of modules that implement python-style generators, some using https://metacpan.org/module/Coro (co-routines implemented as threads), some using crazy hacks:

https://metacpan.org/module/Compile::Generators

https://metacpan.org/module/Coro::Generator

https://metacpan.org/module/Attribute::Generator

asher• 14 years ago

I agree with you about the feeling of fragility, especially with defaultdicts.

As for regexes - while they are somewhat clumsy in python, they don't have to be defined distantly:

  m = re.match(r'(\d{4})', buf)
  if m:
    print "year: %s" % m.group(1)

The only thing that really bothers me about the above is the need to separate the assignment of m from the test.

Re comprehensions: seems to me they are just Python's version of Perl's map and grep.

grep:

  @good = grep { $_->{width} > 9 } @crates;
  good = [c for c in crates if c['width'] > 9]

map:

  @squares = map { $_ * $_ } @nums;
  squares = [i*i for i in nums]

Which is better? I think Ruby's way is the best, and Perl/Python are a wash here.

Now, on the autovivification note, I wonder if we can make a Python class that has the desired behaviors. Like:

  c = PerlishStruct()
  c['foo'][17]['bar'] = 'baz'

You don't really think it's junk, do you? Perl, Python and Ruby are extremely similar; I'd say Perl's more ergonomic, but messier; Python's cleaner, but sometimes awkward, and Ruby pretty much has the best of both worlds.

kamaal6• 14 years ago

Here is another article covering a good deal of detail about Perl in its first 25 years, Its a great read: http://news.perlfoundation.org/2012/12/the-first-twenty-five...

kablamo2• 14 years ago

The stats in the link are interesting. I recently discovered the Code::Statistics module (https://metacpan.org/module/Code::Statistics). It tells you the cyclomatic complexity of your code which wikipedia tells me is basically the number of possible paths through your code.

It might be fun to see that run against the Perl core.

I also like looking at the number of lines of code. If your features go up while complexity and lines of code go down -- that could be a good sign.

maligree• 14 years ago

I'll raise the glass: here's to Perl, for being the first language I could actually get shit done in.

Unmaintainable? Who cared. Got shit done. Too many ways to do things? Who cared. Got shit done.

I have this totally false feeling that BACK THEN* we wrote IRC bots and we were happy. And `perl -e '"A"x800'` was the destroyer of worlds.

* - shit, I just realized I'm young.

5teev• 14 years ago

I like that Perl tends to do what you wanted it to do, rather than what you told it to do. Bugs in other languages are often because of vice-versa.

smoyer4• 14 years ago

Twenty-five years already? Now it can retire with full benefits.

ojosilva• 14 years ago

Here's Perl 1.0, published by Larry on comp.unix.sources 25 years ago ("Revision 1.0 87/12/18 13:07:40 root").

https://groups.google.com/group/comp.sources.unix/browse_frm...

                       Perl Kit, Version 1.0 
 
                   Copyright (c) 1987, Larry Wall 
 
      You may copy the perl kit in whole or in part as long
            as you don't try to make money off it, 
                 or pretend that you wrote it.

mstevens2• 14 years ago

Slightly self-promotion, but you can get a variety of old perl sources at http://www.etla.org/retroperl/ (collected by someone non-me, I can't remember who though)

I had thought someone had done a perl 1 release that built on modern systems, but on a quick hunt I can't find it.

perlgeek• 14 years ago

The perl source repository quite many historic releases also, and the first few commit messages also contain the accompanying release notes.

See for example https://github.com/mirrors/perl/commit/8d063cd8450e59ea1c611... for the perl 1.0 annoucement (click on the [...] link to get the full commit message).

antoni2• 14 years ago

What can I say, it's time to die.

berntb7• 14 years ago

A karma 3 account.

Where are the Perl-hating trolls coming from on HN?

(I thought Guido said that it was time to stop trolling, so it isn't Python people now?)

smoyer4• 14 years ago

Hate is an emotional response that humans have ... how can you tell if the comment was trolling or simply a visceral response?

I don't hate Perl (I first learned CGI programming with it), but I do think there are better ways to write maintainable, enterprise scale software. There are two main problems with Perl (as I see it): 1) The language is so permissive that it allows newbs to write bad code but still obtain results. Habits, both good and bad are learned! 2) Perl experts seem to delight in writing code that's "tricky" (for lack of a better word). It's like a contest to see who can wring the most out of one 80-character line of code and it leads to mid-to-low functioning Perl programmers being confused.

slurgfest5• 14 years ago

I am puzzled why your immediate response is to blame Python.

antoni2• 14 years ago

I thought HN is a place where people don't take everything so seriously (or maybe I should provide some emoticons not to be taken so seriously?). And I also don't understand why people always try to lump together such comments into troll/hater/(in this case)Python-enthusiast category (ever heard of sarcasm?).

I won't explain myself, smoyer's example (except the 'hate' part) pretty much sums up what I think about Perl. And yes, I believe it's a great language, although looking from a state of development of modern languages point of view, objectively speaking, it's a bit outdated language. And therefore, in my opinion, will find less and less applications in the future (and yes, Python is and will be its main competitor in many fields).

olaf• 14 years ago

good joke, ha ha.

VLM• 14 years ago

I've found over the past decade or so that when I write a "perl" program I'm really writing about five lines of glue code around multiple CPAN packages. Well maybe more than 5 lines for control flow, some business-logic error handling, etc.

When I write in another language I spend a long time looking for a library like the ten I'd find in CPAN, sometimes I find one but often enough not, then a long time complaining about how if I used perl I'd have access to the perfect CPAN module and therefore already be done with the whole project, then basically reimplement the CPAN module in the smaller inferior language, then finally write glue logic to link stuff together.

I never fail to be amazed when I see pages and pages of an inadequate homemade xml parser written in an inferior language or maybe a blizzard of regex, and then hearing bragging about how in Perl the elegant alternative language code would closely resemble line noise. No, in Perl, those pages and pages of buggy code would instead closely resemble one line: "use XML::Simple;" Repeat a zillion times over.

My "perl" programs / systems actually shrink in length over time rather than expanding, which is unusual in smaller languages.

mahmud• 14 years ago

CPAN might be centralized, but Java libraries are far superior. This is not a pissing contest, but a fact. The java runtime makes everything else look amateurish and unprepared. Debugging, profiling, introspection and distribution, all built into the platform. Attach to any running process and analyze away. Perl is good when it works, but when it doesn't, it's cryptic stack traces and `exit -1`, nothing meaningful.

berntb7• 14 years ago

Half the point of CPAN is "installability", it is trivial to d/l and install lots of modules. There is also CPAN Testing which drastically helps portability. Can Java really compete with a Perl module that has a long list of dependencies (50+ is a pain but will work) and some code tying it together...? [That was the example in the GP post.]

With all due respect to the Java runtime (if not its memory use :-( ), it is part of a totally different ecosystem compared to the usual suspects of the scripting languages.

(And I'd argue that it is always easier to debug a scripting language than C/C++/Java, except maybe just for long running server processes.)

kamaal6• 14 years ago

>>The java runtime makes everything else look amateurish and unprepared.

The java 'runtime' is hardly Java. Its like saying Pentium is C.

Java the language is hardly comparable with a scripting language like Perl.

kablamo2• 14 years ago

> Attach to any running process and analyze away.

Interesting. It never occurred to me to want this. What sort of use case is this for? It seems Perl is capable of something similar:

    use Enbugger::OnError 'USR1';

Then 'kill -USR1 pid' and your process will jump into the debugger.

learn more here: https://metacpan.org/module/JJORE/Enbugger-2.013/lib/Enbugge...

mst2• 14 years ago

This is not a pissing contest ... but calling it a fact is also silly.

Perl has integrated debugging. Perl has pluggable runops so profilers can be attached to the platform (e.g. Devel::NYTProf). Distribution == CPAN and the 'make dist' system from ExtUtils::MakeMaker, again built in.

The introspection is -different-, perhaps, but I'm not sure I'd say it's better or worse.

Nothing meaningful? You set it to break into the debugger when that exception is thrown, and then debug it. I'm honestly not sure how this is any different an experience to in java - any java application not actively being debugged will write a stack trace to its log file and either exit or move on to the next request too, no?

jrockway2• 14 years ago

Not really true. Yesterday I was trying to debug resource-loading issues. In any normal programming language, you can just strace it and you'll see where the program is doing I/O and you can figure out where it's trying to load files from. But if everything is in a jar, you don't see any OS-level I/O happening when Java tries to load something, so you have to invent all-new tools just to figure things out. When you switch to Java you throw away 40 years of UNIX for a bunch of private methods implemented by summer interns at Sun 20 years ago. The third-party libraries are fine, but the core is not.

Also type erasure.

aboodman• 14 years ago

A recent amusing counter-example:

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/4185665/guava-equivalent-...

btilly3• 14 years ago

Counter point.

When I was at Google, the opinion among some of the SREs I knew was that Java there was better than elsewhere so you actually did get reasonable debugging stack traces, but the C++ libraries there were still significantly easier to debug problems in than the Java ones.

Yes, I know that those AbstractFactoryFactories let you produce convenient higher order abstractions, but when things go pear shaped, they can make it really hard to figure out what was supposed to be happening, let alone where it went wrong.

richo• 14 years ago

Seriously?

This is a fact: <opinion here>.

Java calling anyone else's stack traces is backwards and hilarious, and only going to get better in about 15 years when java finally gets lambdas.

derleth2• 14 years ago

> a "perl" program

Why is perl in quotes here?

Mithaldu4• 14 years ago

Some people use quotes as emphasis. I've found this especially prevalent in people with an asian language background.

noonespecial• 14 years ago

Even when I don't code in perl, when I get stuck and find there are no pre-built libraries in the language I'm using, I find myself going to CPAN... "Lets see how they did this in perl..."

adrianhoward2• 14 years ago

Work stuff is mostly Ruby, Python and PHP. Entertainment is Clojure (mmmmm.... Lispy goodness) and Haskell ATM.

But for my own stuff I still reach for Perl. Best testing infrastructure on the planet and that, in combination with CPAN, lets me get shit done.

peteretep• 14 years ago

I interviewed you once ... approximately forever ago ... and you told me at the time you were just switching to using Ruby for fun stuff, while using Perl for work. I'm glad you switched back, and appreciate your excellent CPAN modules!

adrianhoward2• 14 years ago

I have completely forgotten the interview I'm afraid - but I'm glad you're glad ;)

j98h• 14 years ago

I like perl "expression": perlguts, bless, sv_2mortal, etc i feel we are listening the same song :)

FigBug• 14 years ago

Perl is 25. Python is 21. Lua is 19. Ruby is 17.

Interesting how I consider Perl an 'old' language, and the others new languages. I guess it says more about how revolutionary Perl was at the time and how quickly it became widespread. The only other language I know of that went from 0 to everywhere in under 5 years was Javascript.

podperson• 14 years ago

PHP probably gets in there somewhere. (I looked up the history -- I did not know that PHP was first implemented in Perl.)

PHP was first created in 1994, so it's 18.

davorg• 14 years ago

That's the same age as Perl 5.

felideon• 14 years ago

Common Lisp is 28, which a year younger than C++ and not much older than Perl. So not a dinosaur language as some people think. <g>

prodigal_erik• 14 years ago

Lisp was invented 54 years ago. The Common Lisp standard is the capstone on an unusually long and fractured history of development. Fortunately many of those good ideas have trickled down over the decades, making mainstream languages steadily less terrible, and competing proprietary implementations are no longer commonplace.

chimeracoder• 14 years ago

FORTRAN is the oldest language that is still used today. If you consider the Lisp dialects together as a single language, then Lisp would be a close second.

Scheme, for example, is a decade older than Common Lisp, but it's still commonly considered a Lisp (no pun intended).

chadzawistowski• 14 years ago

Counting the years from the time the languages entered the spotlight might be a better metric of age. Even though Python is only four years younger than Perl, it feels so much newer because it spent more time 'in the oven'.

I'd peg Python's coming of age around 2001, although I could be wrong about that. Ruby is even fresher out of the oven, not really reaching the limelight until 2006.

kyrra2• 14 years ago

Made me look up the timeline of when languages were released: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_programming_languag...

Pascal is 42, C is 40. Lots of fun info on that page.

lloeki2• 14 years ago

I don't know where you can find widespread Pascal, but Fortran is 55 and is still actively used and distributed in NumPy.

trhtrsh4• 14 years ago

JavaScript is 15.

runarb• 14 years ago

Unfortunately it looks like the interest in Perl may be fading a little according to Google trends: http://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=perl%2C%20python%2C%2... (Perl vs Python for comparison)

Mithaldu4• 14 years ago

Please do yourself a favor and mouse over the letters indicating news headlines. :)

knighthacker• 14 years ago

Happy Birthday, Perl :). At Crowdtilt, we are proud to have the majority of our stack Perl based. w00t w00t CPAN :)

bobochan• 14 years ago

Came here looking for someone else wishing Perl many happy returns as it reaches this august landmark.

I have been working as a programmer for 25 years and started using Perl in 1993 or so. I cannot express what it felt like to have this incredibly powerful tool that seemed to integrate all of the sed, awk, shell, and C code that I had for research. Using Perl absolutely felt like magic, particularly for analyzing text.

I love Python, Ruby, and Lua too, but Perl will always be the tool that quickly gets things up and running.

hippich• 14 years ago

I believe most mainstream languages used for web development are quite old now. And today it is matter of personal taste to choose one over another one unless you are constrained by coding standards.

To me Perl is awesome :) Too bad I do PHP for a living, but I still enjoy it when doing something for myself. Like last time I learned about web framework Mojolicious ( http://mojocasts.com/ ) and built http://gotldr.com and http://hntldr.com leveraging Mojolicious and Redis - https://github.com/hippich/perl-tldrer . It took me few evenings, but I really enjoyed tinkering it.

indubitably3• 14 years ago

And Perl 6 is 24

draegtun3• 14 years ago

Considering perl5 is only 18 years old then somethings gone very awry there :)

Perl6 is looking quite fresh considering how old you think it is. I just submitted an article I'd seen to HN which shows how a formula like...

  4.7kΩ ± 5%

... can be parsed inline with Perl6 code.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4939204

indubitably3• 14 years ago

I was just joking :)

It's interesting to me how often people cite "Unicode in code" as some sort of amazing thing. I once posted on S.O. about the idea that maybe we should have a programming language where the vast array of options in Unicode were exploited to make things like Regular Expressions more readable (avoiding the backslash plague alone would be worth it).

I got smacked down by people complaining that they didn't know how to type anything but ASCII.

Sigh.

ChuckMcM2• 14 years ago

I've got an interesting relationship with perl. My first exposure was back in the 80's when I was at Sun and perl was, to my taste, a shell scripting language with the complexity of APL and the readability of Forth. I hated it.

When I took the job at Blekko they said "We do most of our stuff in perl" and I was dubious about that.

However, now that I've been exposed to V5 for a couple of years and have probably written a few thousand lines of code in it, I find its easier to write a quick hack in than Python, and it certainly has a better 'command line' feel than Java. But it wasn't until I started coding up a quick CMS type gizmo for making HTML pages that I truly "got" the power of CPAN backing it up. There is a lot of stuff there. Folks like me who gave up on the language in the V3/V4 days as "hopelessly hacky" should re-visit it.

trhtrsh4• 14 years ago

The V3/V4 days ended in 1994, before Java 1.0 was released.

http://perldoc.perl.org/perlhist.html

ChuckMcM2• 14 years ago

I was first exposed to perl at Sun Microsystems in 1989, I started working on Java in 1992.

http://stuff.mit.edu/afs/sipb/user/marc/hotjava/doc/people.h... (top left corner)

ante_annum• 14 years ago

Do people really still use Perl? It seems to have yielded greatly to other languages in the past few years.

Mithaldu4• 14 years ago

Absolutely: http://stats.cpantesters.org/trends.html#stats6

IheartApplesDix2• 14 years ago

Are you joking? Most of the internet runs on Perl.

Raz0rblade• 14 years ago

should have died 20 years ago its an awful language in my opinion

kenshiro_o• 14 years ago

I haven't written a single line of Perl for over a year now and can't remember much of the language - and I am sure I would not even be able to understand my own code anymore!

Perl is a very handy and powerful scripting language but it should not be considered as a durable solution. Whatever is quickly hacked using Perl should be probably rewritten in a much more structure language, especially if you plan on maintaining this code.

singingfish• 14 years ago

Of course one can also write perl with care and attention. Perl::Critic, the Moose family, and appropriate use of the CPAN really helps with that discipline.

chromatic4• 14 years ago

Whatever is quickly hacked...

... in any language should probably be cleaned up if you plan on maintaining it.

trhtrsh4• 14 years ago

As always, XKCD sums up the situation: http://xkcd.com/224/

draegtun3• 14 years ago

Birthday cake! https://twitter.com/TimToady/status/281119953741029376

Perl is 25 years old today

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