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Re: Been with Perl since the Beginning?
by gam3 (Curate) on Apr 24, 2005 at 02:35 UTC
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It doesn't take hours to download the 31 parts over my 1200 baud modem.
The addition of references made the biggest single change that I can think of.
However I think that it is the codebase in CPAN that makes perl more usable than python, ruby and the others.
-- gam3
A picture is worth a thousand words, but takes 200K.
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Re: Been with Perl since the Beginning?
by Juerd (Abbot) on Apr 24, 2005 at 13:33 UTC
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The first perl I used was some version 4. Later, I found out that 5 already existed at that point, which was why many things that I read about did work on my computer, but not on the web server I was using.
So I have experienced a transition from 4 to 5, and I have to say I couldn't live without references, lexicals and OO anymore. That's one of the major reasons I can't cope with PHP: it lacks real references and lexical variables.
The upgrade to 5.6 was great in many other ways. Lexical filehandles, lexical warnings, the our operator (lexical declaration of global variables), 3-arg open, 0binary notation, I like and use them all. This does mean my code is not compatible with the occasional 5.005 out there, but it makes everything a lot easier to create and maintain.
Upgrading to 5.8 was less spectacular. The only thing that comes to mind is that it has much better unicode support.
5.10 will shine again, with the introduction of the defined-or operator as the (for me) most important improvement.
I have used perl 1, and have even tried (for fun) to create Perl 1+4+5 compatible programs. It's possible! During this I learned a lot about Perl's history. See for example the archaic do syntax for calling subroutines, that is still supported in Perl 5!
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Juerd wrote:
The first perl I used was some version 4. Later, I found out that 5 already existed at that point, which was why many things that I read about did work on my computer, but not on the web server I was using.
Heh. I had that problem with "awk". I had the Aho, Kernighan, Weinberger book on the subject, and I was trying to follow along on a Sun box. It turned out Sun had decided that the latest version of awk was too different from the old one, and had arbitrarily renamed the new one "nawk".
There wasn't any way this could be documented in the definitive book about Awk, because it had happened after the fact.
Anyway, my story is that many people were telling me good things about perl for a long time (I have no idea what version of perl this started with, but it was pretty early -- I've got some friends who are serious unix-hipsters). I ignored what I was hearing until perl 5 was almost out for roughly three reasons:
- I've developed the habit of ignoring hype about the latest and greatest -- when I started in this biz the word was Pascal was going to save the world.
- I had just bought the aforementioned "Awk" book, and I don't like to move on from a subject until I feel like I've mastered it (this means that I don't move on very often).
- I'd been suffering with "rn" for a long time as my main newsreader, and I absolutely hated it, and couldn't imagine why I would want to touch something written by that guy Larry Wall.
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Re: Been with Perl since the Beginning?
by cowboy (Friar) on Apr 24, 2005 at 06:06 UTC
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Well, I can't speak of 'since the beginning', as I started with perl 5. The biggest change for me personally, has been
not so much a change in perl itself, but CPAN, both as it has grown, and as I have grown, learning to use it.
Every time I use a language other than perl, I come out dissapointed, not so much in the language itself, but because they don't have a CPAN equivalent.
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Re: Been with Perl since the Beginning?
by McD (Chaplain) on Apr 26, 2005 at 12:39 UTC
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Wow, nostalgia day here in the Monastery. Ok...
I fell in love with perl 4 as a better scripting language than awk when I discovered it had a debugger - so the pink camel quickly supplanted the grey awk book on my desk... holy cow, ten years ago now.
Shortly after I had wedged a horrible two-dimensioned array into a perl 4 script using split and join, I discovered that what I considered a kluge was in fact the canonical FAQ answer to "how do I create a two-dimensioned array?" But the FAQ promised this would become much easier in the soon-to-be-released Perl 5, thanks to references.
No question about it, Perl 5's references were the biggest change. They opened the door to the complex data structures needed for real-world tasks. They formed the basis of Perl 5's objects, which in turn helped spur the meteoric growth of CPAN.
References. Couldn't live without 'em today.
Peace,
-McD | [reply]
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