The Perl Conference 2018 Session Videos Are Now Online

[phoronix]

Phoronix: The Perl Conference 2018 Session Videos Are Now Online

Taking place last week in Salt Lake City was The Perl Conference 2018, the annual conference devoted to this popular programming language. There were around 300 Perl developers in attendance and a host of presentations by key Perl developers like Larry Wall...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=The-Perl-Conference-2018

[uid313]

I remember Perl, that was a long time ago.
It was a nice step up from the horrible C, which took forever to even do the simplest thing such as reversing a string, and where I would get pretty much anything more complicated than Hello World to segfault.
Perl was a breath of fresh air and made programming fun, in contrast to C that was just painful.

Then I jumped on PHP and it was lots of fun and very productive. Much cleaner and more intuitive than Perl.
While PHP started off like a easier C for the web, over the years it evolved into something really nice with classes, interfaces, namespaces, autoloading, package managers, etc.
PHP still lacked from a terrible inconsistent standard library, also primitive types were not objects, so the language wasn't fully object oriented as far as the saying "everything is an object" goes.

Toyed a bit with Tcl in between, but it was terrible.

Coded lots of Python, and many things are nice, unlike PHP the strings and numbers are actually objects. The object-oriented system is pretty weird tho, prototypes don't appeal to me as much as classes. It's more difficult to understand.
Python is much better than Perl. My biggest gripe with it is that the standard library doesn't have an asynchronous HTTP client.

Coded lots of Java, but its boring and clunky. Lots of boilerplate code. Very boring.

Coded lots of C# on the .NET platform. This is amazing. I love it. Best language ever. Best platform ever.

[szymon_g]

what's the point (apart from maintaining legacy code) of bothering with perl when there is perfectly fine python with normal syntax?

[uid313]

what's the point (apart from maintaining legacy code) of bothering with perl when there is perfectly fine python with normal syntax?

Yeah, I think Python is much better than Perl.
The syntax is much cleaner, and its easier to understand. No weird sigils with $, $$, @$, $@, etc.

[starshipeleven]

I remember Perl, that was a long time ago.
It was a nice step up from the horrible C, which took forever to even do the simplest thing such as reversing a string,

Use libraries?

[Michael_S]

Perl has an image problem. It was the hot language during the dot-com boom which means hundreds of thousands of people that couldn't write a program to sum the integers from 1 to 10 were writing production code.

It takes all of ten minutes to get used to the $,@, and % syntax and it's fine. I like Python and Ruby, but I don't think they're better than Perl.

The only real Perl headache is when someone over uses implicit variables. That can get hard to read if you don't have a chart of them handy. Good Perl developers avoid most of the implicuts to jeep readability.

And Perl6 is a clean redesign of the language that's utterly awesome.. but the user-base is tiny

[starshipeleven]

Perl has an image problem. It was the hot language during the dot-com boom which means hundreds of thousands of people that couldn't write a program to sum the integers from 1 to 10 were writing production code.

Also Java, also C#/.net (on windows), also PHP have the same issue.

[Michael_S]

Also Java, also C#/.net (on windows), also PHP have the same issue.

I don't have any statistics to back this up, but my impression was that Perl was more popular than those three in the 1996-2000 period so most people that encountered awful legacy code from 2001 and many years after were looking at awful legacy code that happened to be Perl.