Perl 1.0? 92
James A. A. Joyce writes "The title says it all. There's a tiny blurb over at dev.perl.org.
Download Perl 1.0 here, for all of those nostalgics in the Slashdot audience! It's only 263KB, so why not give this piece of 1980s computing history a try?"
Re:Quote in the bottom of my slashdot main page (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:There's one good thing about it. (Score:5, Insightful)
Having Python choose that style for you is a terrific readability benefit compared to something like Perl. It makes decyphering other people's Python code very very easy. It may not be exactly what you like - but I think it's a big win in the long run.
What will you complain about next? Having to use squiggly brackets in C? Having to press enter on the command line?
Re:There's one good thing about it. (Score:3, Insightful)
No matter how much Python advocates try to convince me that it'll all somehow be better, I already spend too much time having to clean up irregularly-formatted Java and Objective-C code, and that's just for my own benefit when I have time spare. I don't want to deal with a language where I have to reformat other people's code just so I can work with it.
Re:There's one good thing about it. (Score:1, Insightful)
Instead, code the Perl, and let the magic do the work for you.
Perl is very expressive. It does what you say, and very little that you say has zero effect, compared with Java, where -- perhaps -- half of the code only exists because it must exist. Computo ergo Sum.
As for the sigils, perhaps you are treating programs as English. This is a mistake. A few characters of Perl are like Egyptian Hieroglyphs, tremendously powerful and instantly obvious to the trained eye. So little can be said with so few words, wasting no verbage or nounage. If you try to read it as English instead of understanding the meaning as Perl, you will be lost. @_ is not line noise. It's symbolic -- and for those that think graphically (outside of language), it can be processed very quickly -- as often in software some things have no good English analogue.
Do not pronounce $_ as "dollar_underbar", *know* the meaning of $_. Do not look at %dict as "percent dict", but know what the sigils do for you. They are there to lead the way, all you have to do is understand them instead of read them.
Also grasp the Zen of functional programming and the futility of over-complexity. Complexity serves to make things harder, so one must forego complexity. OOP? Added complexity for small programs. Structure? Add only what is required.
And I suppose you are also wondering about regex syntax. Regexes have clean syntax? This is to say that Elephants are too big and should come in a variety of colors.
Anyhow, learn the idioms, understand the Perl, don't speak it, and you will have a great written language -- if I can't be spoken or translated easily into other languages, perhaps that is the meaning of it's true greatness.
The written language of Egypt and the Mathematics of Babylon are not analogous to what English/Arabic -- but this doesn't mean they are not worthy of our study. What you see as line noise or drawings painted on walls may carry an elegance that simple utilitarian code-as-English will never succeed at grasping.
Larry's interest in language has benefitted Perl immensely. Try to look on Perl with that light.