Ada Sbut of course! The Camel! The Monks!
you're never getting employed, are you?
learn perl 6!!!!!!
Poll ended at .
Paul Evans@adanskana Yes, but start with something new and modern. `use v5.36` and so on... A lot of the new bits are much nicer than "the old stuff"
Profoundly Nerdy@leonerd @adanskana I second this! Ultra modern Perl is pretty cool.
Lorenzo Gabriele@adanskana what moves you to learn this language? I don't know it but I haven't heard great things about it.
Mark Gardner@lolgab @adanskana The fun thing about conventional wisdom is that it becomes more wrong the further it travels from firsthand experience.
Learn #Perl: https://learn.perl.org
@mjgardner @adanskana That's why I was asking :)
Bartosz Jarzyna@adanskana Sure, why not - it's fun and super useful. Won't hurt to learn some basics. Even if you don't like it much, it can still be a much saner bash replacement.
@adanskana I say you split the difference: take up some modern Perl and get to know #Rakulang at least in passing. Why? Because the two languages are absolutely influencing each other.
librasteve@profoundlynerdy @adanskana I second this ... I spent about 3 years coding perl professionally and really enjoyed the way that it feels (after some learning curve) - I would say that raku is now (finally) in a good place and has kept a lot of the feel of perl plus a lot of great new ideas
@adanskana Fun fact: When you learn an overwhelmingly popular #programming language to increase your employability, you become a cheap interchangeable commodity along with every other #programmer using that language.
Dragon-sided D@adanskana You should learn Perl because you wish to be a cultured individual who has a toolkit of creative solutions for real world problems.
Steve Downey@adanskana Perl 6 is boring because it's not Raku, it's some merely evolutionary weirdness.
Learn J.
Then write some macros and primitives to write C in J syntax.
....
Profit.
Ivan Gayton@adanskana I hear COBOL is a great way to stay employed maintaining ancient-but-critical financial infrastructure!
WGAvanDijk@adanskana
Even better, do not learn Perl 6 because it does not exist anymore. Instead, learn Raku.
#RakuLang
Even better, do not learn Perl 6 because it does not exist anymore. Instead, learn Raku.
#RakuLang
cmdrSprocket@adanskana It's okay to be a little crazy!
sbszine@adanskana Perl is the most enjoyable language to write yourself and the worst to debug someone else's code
Athanasius HAS MOVED@adanskana My limited, now a few years old, experience of perl with respect to the exact things I was trying to achieve at the time, is that if you think you can rely on CPAN for things... you might run into "oh, the maintainer of that hasn't updated it in 5+ years and there's nothing but silence in response to any bug reports or enhancement requests. Good luck figuring out the deep Perl voodoo they used in order to fix/enhance it yourself."
This is why I start new projects in Python now. Sure, it has abandoned modules as well, but I've not *yet* had quite the same show-stopper issues.
@AthanSpod thats good to know. i thought i was going to have similar issues to this when i learnt common lisp, but the stability of the language and implementations meant that most libraries just continue to work with minimal hacking.
perl does seem a little less easy to hack upon by virtue of its 'voodoo'.
perl does seem a little less easy to hack upon by virtue of its 'voodoo'.
@AthanSpod @adanskana just a mention that Raku has Inline::Perl5 and Inline::Python (as well as 2000+ raku native modules at raku.land and C FFI in the core), this is not 100% ideal, but it lowers the chicken / egg barriers
tautology@adanskana If you go back in time to the year 2000 then yes. Nowadays perl is found wanting compared to other languages and environments.
Trammell Hudson@adanskana if you need any Perl references... (note: I no longer have any of these books)
@th oh, that would be a dream collection to have. I've been collecting lisp books and id love to have a selection of perl reference books too.
theres something so exciting to me about using a hard copy reference guide... god im such a nerd.
theres something so exciting to me about using a hard copy reference guide... god im such a nerd.
Thorne Lawler@adanskana @cstross I’d love this to somehow be attached to a sub-poll so that for each response we could see how many respondents know Perl, how many are employed in IT, and how many are Damian Conway.
Fish Id Wardrobe ⁂@adanskana How do you feel about code golf?
@fishidwardrobe i’ve tried my hand at regular golf and my hand wasn’t quite up to the task unfortunately. i believe code golf will elicit a similar result…
Wes George@adanskana @cstross not necessarily useful feedback but it may be amusing: I had a colleague some years ago that was Scottish. His pronunciation of "perl" sounded to US ears like "peril" and a good number of my other colleagues with experience using perl decided this was a pretty accurate quasi-homophone.
@wesgeorge @cstross HAHAHAHA that’s very funny
mathew@adanskana I wrote Perl for years. When I saw the direction Perl 6 was going (more inscrutable syntax, more complexity) I switched to Ruby. No regrets. It’s great for all the things I used to use Perl for.
@mathew interesting. for some reason, i dont feel the same draw to ruby as i do to perl. the culture surrounding perl is something i really want to become aquainted with - it gives me the same warm, fuzzy feeling common lisp does for me.
Allpoints@adanskana It f you want to learn Pearl, PHP or, for that matter, COBOL, FORTRAN or Latin because you think it's fun, go for it. If you're doing it for employment purposes you might want to give it a second thought.
Svante@adanskana It depends. If it's for fun, or for some concrete opportunity, there can be worse choices. I remember having a lot of fun reading the man pages 20 years ago (»This may seem weird, but that's OK, because it /is/ weird.«).
If it's for resume building or general preparedness, I'd have different ideas.
@Ardubal I mean, its certainly more for fun than anything else. I have a bit of an obsession with retro computing and yester-year programming languages. My favourite programming language at the moment is Common Lisp, for instance.
I feel like Perl could fill the niche that I want between bash scripting and something heavier like Python. The main draw as well is the ubiquity of Perl; you can find it pretty much anywhere. I want a tool like that.
I feel like Perl could fill the niche that I want between bash scripting and something heavier like Python. The main draw as well is the ubiquity of Perl; you can find it pretty much anywhere. I want a tool like that.
@adanskana Oh, I'm with you on Common #Lisp 🤗 I use it for everything (except at work, where we mostly do Clojure, and script in Babashka).
@Ardubal it really is the most versatile tool ive ever had the pleasure of using.
also, envious that you get to work with clojure for a living!! so cool :)
also, envious that you get to work with clojure for a living!! so cool :)
@adanskana @Ardubal - I think that you have put your finger on the most enduring use case of perl - since it is rock solid and everywhere, it remains a very useful CLI tool (and originally came out of an evolution of shell languages, so it is a very natural step from eg bash) ...
@librasteve @Ardubal right. i think thats why i want to learn #perl rather than #raku. I already have my powerful but mostly obscure and slightly less portable language (common lisp) but i want something that i can treat with almost the same level of ubiquity as bash scripting.
Alfonso UrdanetaIf you're doing it for fun because you want to learn odd languages, why not Ada?
@aeu For some reason i just really, really prefer dynamic languages compared to static ones like ada. I like the strong typing, but I can get the same kicks from common lisp's type system :)