Comments by "Lawrence D’Oliveiro" (@lawrencedoliveiro9104) on "Perl in 100 Seconds" video.

  1. “Modernizing” and “PowerShell” in the same sentence ... 🤣🤮
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  2. You are free to change your shell to perl, if you want. You can even do it permanently by editing your /etc/passwd entry. You will soon discover why that’s a bad idea.
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  3. The PHP developers had no idea about Perl. They saw that “$” syntax, but didn’t understand what it meant in context (denotes scalar variables), and decided to use it for all their variables. Now they are looking at Python, and they still have no idea how its features work together. So they are copying ideas like iterators, and screwing them up.
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  4. Larry Wall is known for two major accomplishments: he created patch, and he created Perl. Of the two, the concepts of patch have spread to permeate the whole of open-source collaborative development. So that will likely live on in some form forever. Perl? Maybe not so much.
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  5. The fact that variables are global by default is a definite misfeature. Even JavaScript fixes that in “strict” mode. I think Perl has a strict mode too, but I don’t really use it any more, so I can’t be bothered to find out. Trivia question: before Perl had “my”, it had “local”. Why wasn’t that good enough? Why was “my” added?
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  6. Variables should not be global by default.
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  7. 1:27 That should be “$nums[1]”. 1:34 And that should be “$friends{'Larry'}”. Welcome to Perl syntax. Does it make sense yet?
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  8.  @bit2shift  Perl used other characters with variables as well. Yet it was “$” that PHP chose to copy. Fun fact: in Perl a name can mean at least four different things, depending on which of these characters it is prefixed with. And also depending on whether it is followed by a pair of parentheses, brackets or braces (or none of these).
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  9. Similar here, I guess. My main reference was the man pages (just type “man -s1 -k perl” to see how many there are). But I was never entirely sure I understood the implications of some of the language features I was using. Then I discovered Python. That had a much cleaner syntax, and all the language features actually made sense. So I switched, and pretty much stopped using Perl.
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