I recall a great talk a couple years ago at OSCON that Damian Conway gave about how you could essentially turn Perl into a custom language that exactly fit your needs. I walked out of there thinking "wow! That is incredibly awesome, and yet I would never consider it for a business environment." Perl is an appealing language for people who like languages. I count myself as one of those. But I cannot deny that Python makes so much more sense for teams of more than one person.
At that point the difference is just syntax.
function myFunc () {
var myFunc2 = function () {};
return myFunc3().then(myFunc2);
}
> At that point the difference is just syntax.
Isn't that the case with most things? If I said that I missed curly braces, that's "just syntax" too.
You're right that almost all dynamic languages have this feature, but to give you two notable languages that don't: C doesn't allow defining inner functions. Pascal allows to define inner functions, but doesn't allow you to return them. C++ does allow you to define inner functions (actually functor classes) and allows you to return them, but you need to be explicit about the capturing process.
It is less frustrating for me than the fact that the scoping rules for a var in JavaScript mean that you're likely to scope to the nearest function call rather than loop. Despite having anonymous functions, doing what I would want to do with them in JavaScript is often much harder than doing it in Python.
>This isn't some Python-specific thing.
I think btilly meant that by the ability to do in Python what he described (define a nested function and then return it), you get (almost) all the same features as anonymous functions (and specifically, more than Python's lambdas give you, because they can only contain an expression, not statements) - in response to what you said:
>Python just has lambda functions which can only evaluate an expression.
In fact, IIRC, Guido (van Rossum, Python creator) has been known to say, to people who complain about the limitations of lambda in Python, to just use nested functions. And BTW they are quite powerful so you can do a lot with them.
He (btilly) was not implying that other languages cannot have nested function declarations (if I understood his comment right).
I'm not saying that they aren't powerful. I'm saying that personally, I find declaring one-time-use functions in-line to be syntactically more pleasant / organized than sticking the function definition in the middle of functional code.
I'm not a newbie to Python, but after working with it for years, it's one of those things that I still wish existed. It's not necessarily a pain point or deal breaker or anything. I'm not even sure how it could work given Python's syntax.
Ok, I get what you mean now, and think you have a point there.
It's a tool that can be abused. Saying that the number of tools available should be limited so that they can't be abused seems counter-productive.
See static typing, golang, and functional languages.
Why does it have something called 'say' instead of something more intuitive like 'println'. Then there are worse examples: carp, cluck, croak. These are commonly used. They are from the same module of course. There is also Moo, Moose. I'm not sure but was there something called 'Mo' too? Commonly used of course but as you can see from the names - you can't tell what they are for.
So, I think from some of the choices made in how the language is, it ended up being more drawn towards unreadability than readability by attracting a kind of mindset that wanted it to be 'fun' in a way that only a clique could relate to and now if the language doesn't have broad appeal, I think it shouldn't be that hard for them to accept that fact.
In fact Moose, Catalyst, Starman, etc were all projects specifically named more fun _becasue_ their authors saw other communities not naming things "DBIx::Class" or "ExtUtils::MakeMaker" and wanted to bring some of that fun to Perl.
'say' is a lot more intuitive than 'println' for me. In the former case, I'm telling my program to say something. In the latter case, I'm telling it to... print? What if I don't have a printer? And what's a 'ln'? Line? Loan? Loon?
In other words, 'println' is not "intuitive". The word you're looking for is "conventional" or "familiar", and it's only either or both of those things if the programmer is coming from a different language.
Perl was the first programming language that really "clicked" for me, though, so I'm probably a bit biased there.
(as a side note, Perl has a 'print' as well, which actually predates 'say' by a considerable amount ('say' only became a thing in, what, Perl 5.10?). 'say' is pretty much just 'sub say { print "$_[0]\n"; }'.)
"Then there are worse examples: carp, cluck, croak."
'carp' and 'cluck' are weird, yeah. 'croak', however, makes sense in the context of 'die'.
"There is also Moo, Moose."
Both of which feature the letters "oo", which usually stands for "object-oriented". Not as obvious as I'd personally like, but once you spot that it becomes clear that both have at least something to do with Perl5's object system.
But yeah. Perl 5's flavor of object-orientation is remarkable for exposing the inner workings of objects to the programmer. Fields are just hash table items. Methods are just subs that take the object as the first parameter. Classes are just namespaces/modules full of methods and constructors. Constructors are just ordinary subs that return blessed data structures.
It's all remarkably simple and elegant once you're used to it.
"Say" is a common English verb that fairly directly communicates the action performed (with a bit of metaphor, sure.)
"Println" is, well it starts out with something which might be as good as "say" and then has some extra opaque consonants glued on the end.
The latter is only "more intuitive" from the perspective of someone whose used languages which happen to use it in the past.
Why is the Unix command `ls` not `list-directory-contents`? Sure, it's a lot more for everyone to type all the time, but you could get rid of a single line in the man page, meaning the name is much, much more intuitive!
I'm not a Perl expert, but have read books on it and done a bit with it. I think Perl tends to attract the kind of people who find these kinds of names (and many other things) fun, and are not put off by it - which is fine.
>worse examples
According to who(m)? Opinions differ.
All of those other languages "just work" too. I'm not really sure what you're getting at with this comment.
I worked with Perl 5.x in for 4 years a while ago. It's not as bad as people really think it is. That said, there are a lot of things that can cause you to go wrong. For example: source filters. Super powerful, but if implemented wrong can make debugging a nightmare.
Most of the horror stories that you'll hear about perl are from people who have tried to fix/maintain code that was written badly, which is no different from any other language. You can write horrific or easily-readable code in any language.
Perhaps perl has its reputation because it is often used as a quick kludge to do something that would be just too painful to do in shell script, and novice writers just cut & paste stuff from their searches online to get the job done?