in reply to Something to meditate on -- the need for a trendy perl?

I think the problem is that college professors like heavily object oriented languages like C++, Python, Ruby, etc., because it makes their jobs easier. They just can't handle the freedom which Perl offers, as it makes grading student's code more difficult, with all the different ways Perl can do the job.

I think it's a reflection of the stodginess moving into corporate culture, where nobody wants risk, and they want all employees trained exactly the same. We are losing the lead in technology because of this mindset .... no risk, no gain.

I'm not really a human, but I play one on earth.
Old Perl Programmer Haiku ................... flash japh
  • Comment on Re: Something to meditate on -- the need for a trendy perl?

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Re^2: Something to meditate on -- the need for a trendy perl?
by choroba (Cardinal) on Mar 11, 2014 at 15:41 UTC
    I was a university teacher for several years. I quit half a year ago. I used Perl in my research, and I taught it to my students. The reason why my colleagues were shifting (mostly to Python) was different: laziness. They needed libraries for machine learning, and they already existed in Python. Maybe we, the community, are not working hard enough to keep Perl "trendy", whatever it might mean?
    لսႽ† ᥲᥒ⚪⟊Ⴙᘓᖇ Ꮅᘓᖇ⎱ Ⴙᥲ𝇋ƙᘓᖇ
[reply]
      IMHO academics prefer axiomatic systems where a limited set of rules can be applied to derive the rest. Your colleagues can be lazy b/c other academics prepared the modules.

      Maybe I don't know Python enough to tell, but it has this appeal ... while Perl is a pile of DWIM magic exceptions, which are fun for experienced coders who don't wanna miss their features from other languages (bash, sed, awk, c, lisp, ...) but do confuse many Asperger folks who only accept "one way to do it".

      Ruby OTOH shows that it is possible to transport rich semantics into a more orthogonal syntax, by breaking compatibility to Perl5.

      Should be noted that P5 never really broke compatibility to P4, thus giving it an incredible amount of obscure features and exception rules.

      Cheers Rolf

      ( addicted to the Perl Programming Language)

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Re^2: Something to meditate on -- the need for a trendy perl?
by Arunbear (Prior) on Mar 12, 2014 at 11:01 UTC
    "heavily object oriented languages like C++, Python ..."
    What? C++ and Python are multi-paradigm languages where OOP is as optional as it is in Perl.
[reply]
      I stand corrected, especially for C++, but I still think of them being more OO than C or Perl.

      From: everything is an object in Python :

      "This is so important that I'm going to repeat it in case you missed it the first few times: everything in Python is an object. Strings are objects. Lists are objects. Functions are objects. Even modules are objects. "

      I'm not really a human, but I play one on earth.
      Old Perl Programmer Haiku ................... flash japh
[reply]
        Yes, everything in Python is an object, but the language does not force you to code in the OO style (unlike e.g. Java).

        Perl's object system was 'borrowed' from Python, so e.g. in both languages instance methods are just functions that take 'self' as the first parameter to access the object's state: 

        # Perl
sub get_name {
    my ($self) = @_;

    return $self->{name};
}

# Python
def get_name(self):
    return self.name

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[d/l]
      Pythonistas like to claim having a multi-paradigm language and right in the next phrase they'll tell you that there shouldn't be more than one way to do it.

      Perl for instance is far closer to LISP, lambdas (anonymous subs) are not restricted to one statement and Perl's my is provides a declaration like LISP's let lacking in Ruby, Python and to some extent even in JS.

      I had the privilege to see a presentation of a Python module which was a port from Ruby, and it's almost ridiculous to see how they try to circumvent the limitations of their syntax to be able to reflect real lamdas ("code-blocks" in Ruby).

      Cheers Rolf

      ( addicted to the Perl Programming Language)

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