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On the future of Perl 5On the future of Perl 5Posted Dec 3, 2008 15:39 UTC (Wed) by jzbiciak (✭ supporter ✭, #5246)In reply to: On the future of Perl 5 by clugstj Parent article: On the future of Perl 5
I guess it came somewhat naturally to me, having programmed in Microsoft BASIC for all those years. That said, having $A refer to one thing, @A refer to another, and $A[0] refer to the latter, not the former (as opposed to, say, @A[0]) took a little getting used to. I'm personally wondering when Perl 6 is getting here. I personally put off learning Perl 5 in greater depth for awhile when I heard that Perl 6 was Coming Real Soon and was going to have Radical Changes. That was almost a decade ago. Maybe that had something to do with Perl's declining popularity?
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On the future of Perl 5 Posted Dec 3, 2008 15:40 UTC (Wed) by jzbiciak (✭ supporter ✭, #5246) [Link]
Personally, I personally feel I was personally redundant in that last paragraph. I personally apologize. Personally.
On the future of Perl 5 Posted Dec 3, 2008 16:01 UTC (Wed) by stijn (subscriber, #570) [Link]
Same here, I got used to the sigils pretty easily, back in 1994. Complaining about them is pretty similar to complaining about Python's use of indentation
for block structure. I find the latter pretty annoying, but at the same time it is just something to get used to and get over. Perl is not as idiosyncratic as sometimes made out to be.
About perl 6, I've found the apocalypses pretty depressing reading. There is heaps of syntax, and it seems that syntax of tokens/operators is overloaded to the fullest extent possible, depending on the types of the surrounding expressions. It looks too baroque for my taste. At the same time I'd like to salute Larry Wall for perl, I think he and co-authors created a great language and a good community. In bioinformatics perl is certainly still alive and kicking. Apparently the perl 5 internals have become hard to hack. Perhaps it needs a drastic solution (reimplementation that does not promise backwards compatibility) different from perl 6.
On the future of Perl 5 Posted Dec 3, 2008 17:11 UTC (Wed) by jzbiciak (✭ supporter ✭, #5246) [Link]
As I recall, weren't they going to provide a Perl 5 reimplementation in Perl 6 to bridge old scripts forward? Of course, Perl 6 looks to be the ultimate case of Kitchen Sink Syndrome.
On the future of Perl 5 Posted Dec 3, 2008 17:48 UTC (Wed) by jordip (guest, #47356) [Link]
A friend of mine just entered in a bioinformatics lab and they ask her to learn Perl. I just took my first look to the language trying to help her and for simple data managing scripts it is quite neat.
I wondered why they make the students learn perl instead of other languages. It looks like there are a big library of scripts with all sorts of utilities noone want to rewrite .... Maybe I am wrong...
Biopython Posted Dec 3, 2008 19:56 UTC (Wed) by southey (subscriber, #9466) [Link]
No need to say any more than biopython http://biopython.org for bioinformatics.
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