I took a six month break from Perl. I know it better than any other language.<p>I recently started using it again for one offs. I love Perl. It is so much fun to be totally fluent in a language.<p>Then I wrote a one page app in it. Oh my god, I can't believe anyone still uses Perl.<p>Its strange. I love it. I hate it. Its great. Its a piece of shit. I am familiar with Modern Perl practices... I just can't understand why anyone without a massive legacy codebase bothers.
I've been working with Perl on and off since 1997 and similar to many I've been disgusted by some of the code I've come across created during that time. Perl has come a long way even since version 5.0.0 and is quite a different character these days. The problem I've had with recommending the language is that unlike C which really hasn't changed(at least to me), Perl has slowly evolved but many of the books in print still point to the older version. While Perl is excellent in maintaining backward-compatibility with earlier versions, knowing and learning the "modern" versions has been a more painful task then it should be. I think this book changes that.<p>I just spent about 30 minutes skimming through it. It's only 260 pages in clear and articulate English. Should this be THE new Perl book? Could be...I think this coupled with Effective Perl Programming that came out a few months ago are great for getting onboard or returning to the world of Perl. Hats off to you Chromatic for your work on this.<p>There may not be any reasons to learn Perl if you already know Ruby/Python/Tcl/Lua but you certainly won't be worse for it if you do. At the end of the day, it's just another tool and I love having access to so many great ones these days.
Glad to see the book - and it looks a good read. Perl really has evolved as a language & community over the last few years and it's still my go-to language for my own projects. Despite having been mostly Python/PHP on the dev side the last couple of years - and being a huge Ruby fan.<p>The core of the language still has some warts - but there's still some interesting stuff to play with.<p>Three reasons to have a look at the language if you haven't before (or take another look if you've been away from perl for a few years):<p>* Moose - <a href="http://moose.perl.org" rel="nofollow">http://moose.perl.org</a> - is becoming the de facto OO layer on top of Perl's basic OO system. It has some interesting features that you don't see in most other OO languages (Roles for example.)<p>* CPAN - <a href="http://search.cpan.org" rel="nofollow">http://search.cpan.org</a> - the library of perl modules. Interesting for a couple of reasons. First it's scope is amazing. When I need to talk to some weird API there's usually something there to help. Cuts development time enormously. Second - the infrastructure of CPAN itself is fascinating. The way that things like <a href="http://cpantesters.org" rel="nofollow">http://cpantesters.org</a>, <a href="http://search.cpan.org" rel="nofollow">http://search.cpan.org</a>, the standard methods for building libaries and modules, etc. all work together is an interesting software ecology. Worthy of study. Lessons to be learned there for gems et al.<p>* Testing. The testing infrastructure in perl is _amazing_. It's the best I've used in any language. That's because it's evolved around a language/framework agnostic testing protocol TAP (<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Test_Anything_Protocol" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Test_Anything_Protocol</a>) that allows many different styles of testing to co-exist in the same test running framework. Really nice stuff.
This looks interesting and I'm always happy to see good documentation appear, even if for a language I rarely use. My one suggestion would be a PDF typeset for on-screen reference. The font size is very hard to read at "best fit" on a 1152px high screen, even when maximized. If you wanted to match the print page numbers, you could cut down the margins on the electronic version.
For web developments, be sure to check out the Mojolicious framework (created by the founder of Catalyst). When used with PSGI and Moose, a lot of interesting stuffs can be built.<p><a href="http://mojolicious.org" rel="nofollow">http://mojolicious.org</a>
Ok, I am a solid PHP developer, pretty advanced with Ruby, and can do front end code and JQuery with my eyes closed.<p>Should I be interested in Perl? Is there any reason to learn it if I know these other languages? I am genuinely curious