zlacker

I spent year developing CMS in Perl in 1999 (HTA application with ActivePerl. wonder if anybody else did something like this). It traumatized me, and first thing that I did in my next job is to learn python and develop some core systems in it. Few of my friends moved from perl to python as well.

I still remember spending time with my coworkers on bench outside of building trying to figure out #@$%$^&$%@something = []sd[dsd]@$#!&lala lines written by previous developers

>>tguvot+(OP)
Before I eventually switched to PHP, I ended up writing multiple CMS-like solutions that would run via `cgi-bin` but write contents to the webroot (what we would now call a static site generator). As I was quite limited with the standard shared hosting at the time, I ended up inventing my own single file database format (it was a simple text file) to keep state. It worked quite beautifully and kept me afloat for the first few years of my life as a web developer around the early 2000s.

I was aware of ActivePerl and quite liked Komodo. Thankfully I could keep myself from doing things on Windows/IIS apart from a brief stint writing a single file CMS in ASP.

>>tguvot+(OP)
Perl heads are downvoting you but I agree as a longtime ex Perl user that the sigils were noisy nonsense.

The original intent was you could see var types with them - $scalar, @array, %hash.

They immediately broke this by deciding the sigil would apply to the value /extracted/ from the data structure. So you declared array @foo but accessed an element as $foo[1]. What? There’s a logic there but already you’re violating many people’s expectations so why even have them. The sigils are now confusing many people instead of clarifying anything.

The sigil idea then /completely/ failed when they introduced references and “complex data structures” (nesting arrays within arrays like every other language - in Perl this was a special thing because they had been flattening lists by default so no way to put one inside another).

So now to get at a hash in a hash you used not % but $ since a reference is a scalar. $hash1->$hash2->{“key”}. Versus $hash3{“key”} for a simple hash. Just awful noisy syntax. Due to poor language design up front.

>>tsak+P1
I wrote php2 + msql before starting in that company (and a bit of php3). Like in your case it was essentially static site generator but the management part was HTA (application hosted in internet explorer. you could write one using whatever activex/language: vbscript, python, perl).

as backend we had oracle. at first we tried oracle/linux (just released). but we never managed make it work (oracle engineers that came to us failed as well). So we got dedicated sun server for it.

One day I was bored, installed mysql on my workstation, made a changes in couple of queries and all of sudden i got x20 performance of sun box with oracle. Lead developer said that it's bad solution as mysql doesn't properly supports referential integrity (we didn't actually used it in oracle iirc)

>>educti+d4
Oops last example should be $hash1->{“hash2”} - this is a whole hash referenced with $ because of the implementation detail that it is in hash1 as a reference, which is considered a scalar.

Technically you are allowed to use % like so: %{$hash1->{“hash2”}}. Which, just - lol.

>>educti+d4
Before that job in perl i wrote asm/tcl/delphi/c/php (and bunch of other languages after).

This perl syntax caused some kind of rejection on almost physical level. It was same for many of my friends. "Zen of python" was a breath of fresh air.

>>educti+d4
and people wonder why raku had so many things it needed to change to free the excellent core of the language and its ideas

>>tguvot+(OP)
Yesterday I used `pwgen` to role a random password, and at first glance I legit thought it might've been working Perl code. I'm not even slightly kidding.

>>educti+d4
That last paragraph got me off Perl to Python. The first time I wrote Python like hash1[hash2]["key"] and it worked, then tried hash1[hash2]["array_name"][3] and it worked because that's the obvious way to write something, I fell in love and never looked back.

I never wanted to have to reason my way through chasing pointers through nested hashrefs again.