Rare Interview with a Perl programmer
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 28 ส.ค. 2024
- Perl programming language
Rare Interview with a Perl programmer with Walter Wallis - aired on © The Black Perl.
Find more Perl Art & Poetry under:
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Programmer humor
Perl humor
Programming jokes
Programming memes
Perl
Cobol memes
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#programming
#jokes
#perl
![Interview with an Emacs Enthusiast in 2023 [Colorized]](/img/n.gif)
So true! I wrote a perl script 17 years ago in a large telecom company to process some data. Their CTO found me in facebook 15 years later to ask a question about it!
hahahaha My God. Software is such a messed up place. :)
no kidding, I experienced this with c++ because the company had a blowout and lost all their devs except the new guys. They offered me 15k and a writeup contract to my current job for me to go on loan for a week to teach them the system we wrote lol
@@hawks3109 what is this blowout you speak off. Lately we also got like many software engineers leaving due to how things go... im also about to leave and im on 2 huge projects and am the only software engineer that has experience in programming these kind of systems. (You also not only need to know a language, but also have experience with how these systems operate in practise) i feel like probably make them furious. But i get too stressed not only with these 2 huge projects but get constantly interrupted with other projects.
@@HermanWillems I know what you mean. interruptions are part of every company I've been at though. The more you know, the more people come to you. It's just how it goes.
The blowout was that all of their existing engineers all left to bigger companies. They lost them all too quickly to pass the knowledge on. I got paid for 1 week of my time, plus my current company got paid a buyout for my time that week as well. I put together a few slides on what I remembered and presented them. Answered questions, then showed them how we used to do our workflow with the system. I fixed a few example bugs to demonstrate what I was showing them. Then I left haha
That was you??? :-)
I once opened up a Perl textbook and in the introduction it said that the book was about Perl 5 instead of Perl 6, despite 6 being more well designed, because getting hired as a Perl developer means maintaining old code, not writing new code, and since companies mostly have old Perl 5 code, there's no point in learning Perl 6. Saddest thing I ever read, and never looked at Perl again.
Lol
Yeah, Perl 6 kind of spun out of control and went off to become its own language (Raku). The next version of Perl will be Perl 7, skipping 6 entirely. It'll be similar to Perl 5 but with some of the older cruft removed and the rest cleaned up a bit.
If you're comfortable with shell scripting and have worked with awk, sed, etc., Perl's great. It's a very useful tool for a UNIX/Linux sysadmin or someone that needs to do real-world quick-and-dirty text manipulation. Programmers used to more conventional languages tend to find it weird and awkward, though, which is a major reason you don't see it used for newer projects.
Haha
@@jeffspaulding9834 Last Perl script I wrote was 6 years ago. But I use one liners of Perl every day. They are super handy, simple and fast.
@@arthurmorgan8966 I don't use Perl as much as I used to, although that's mostly because most of my text-mangling has moved to Emacs Lisp. Not that anything is wrong with Perl, it's just that Emacs fits the workflow for my current job better than Perl.
I never got into the one liner habit with Perl, strangely enough - I intentionally avoid using Perl for one liners just so my (rather mediocre) shell scripting skills don't go rusty on me.
"The reason I use Perl is because
I wanna write scripts that no one
can read and no one can understand
so that I can keep my job."
-Walter Wallis
it could be applied on a lot of languages
And that’s a bad practise, not healthy to you and your team. But as a meme I commend this.
@@therealslimaddy Bad practice, good praxis.
@I ain't no millionaires son! I hate to be that guy, But yeah I feel ya
@@GuillermoPradoObando Have you seen perl's syntax? if you have seen you might say otherwise
- "Is this encryption?"
- "This is a new perl script I've been working on"
That killed me :V
Good one! :v
I can say the same thing about python. It looks cryptic to me.
@@iarde3422 Ah cmon, Python is almost written English except for the damn indentations.
@@B20C0 yeah, right. When I look @ python program, it's really hard to understand, what is going on and when I understand something, but not everything and I understand most in C++ programs. Also, programs in python are too wordy in comparison to perl.
"I want to use Perl so I can write scripts no one can read or no one can understand." This is true even for other Perl programmers. It doesn't have to be a write-only language, but often that's what happens.
No one can read or understand. Includes the author of the script too
I think that's what this video misses the most... we never set out to write unreadable code, it's just a byproduct of having no coding discipline and a deadline.
Not at all. I can understand pretty much everything people write in perl. Even if they sometimes use unconventional formating
Ask any other perl programmer, they'll very likely tell you the same thing
@@DanielAfonso-IT_Consultant i have this at my work. I write a program 80% finished. But the company needed me on another project. Someone else finished it in a rush. A new guy. And then it became unreadable and a huge spaghetti. He did not keep himself to the original dataflow structure. And later on... when the program was in testing phase it ended up all having bugs. And then they said i need to fix it because i made the program. Literally 100% of all the bugs where in the spaghetti code or either the guy bing too lazy to handle errors. Just only programmed happy flow. Me: puked and removed literally all his code and finished the last 20% rewriting it. My god.
"What happens in the 80's stays in the 80's .... except for Perl" lol!
yeah, that line killed me xD
I was looking for this comment 😂
Damn right - it's STILL here in 2024!
Fun fact, Perl is only 4 years older than Python.
to be clear, he's talking about the year 19 AD, back when he was writing build scripts with teenage jesus
Saint segfault the apostle 😭
@@moncefkarimaitbelkacem1918 He's not a saint. He's a demon.
@@studybuddy7060daemon*
That's why humans have cryptic encodings no one can understand and inevitably break down after a few decades.
Perl, the most beautiful, powerful and flexible scripting language. Live long and prosper!!!
here we have the uprising of the dead
@@user-ub3hd4sy4e It kicks ass to most of the languages. Otherwise, why would you think, all other languages would adapt perl's features?
Don't forget: concise and fast! Fast to write, fast to run. Did I mention job security?
as someone who had the "pleasure" of doing IT work with an entire environment built in perl - this video is so god damn accurate of the people around
Do you remember back in 19?
sorry you had to endure that
@@edsanville 😏👈👈.......think about it
@@edsanville ...uh, like uh, 20th century.
@@edsanvillei remember back in 19
As it happens, I'm writing a script for a regular expressions tutorial. Mind if I use that clip of you saying "regular expressions" as a cutaway joke?
It’s Creative Commons anyway.
@Thomasfrank Fancy seeing you here!
"What happens in the 80ies, stays in the 80ies. Except for pearl." :'D
Cobol was "this shit" in the 80's ffs ..
The dice roll got me rolling!! Hahahah
Suspenseful music. Two FBI agents standing behind the division's prodigy hacker, for the serious cases. Every second counts. He's almost in the enemy's system. Frantic hacking on the keyboard, cool hacker stuff on the screen.
Hacker, smug undertone: "Bingo, we're in"
Agent1: "so where is it?"
Hacker: "just a second... Got it, this file will tell us everything"
The hacker locates a file and opens it in vim. The camera focuses on the screen, which displays a 20 line Perl Script.
Hacker, with desperation in his voice: "oh no..."
Agent2: "what is it?"
Hacker: "it's heavily encrypted. This is gonna take weeks!"
as a perl programmer I find this hilarious.
Such people still exist amazing 🤩
sus
Are you a Highlander?
I'm one of 15 Perl programmers in our company.
And our code base isn't even from last century - Perl is just good at 95% of what we are doing.
A perl programmer in 2022! Whyyyyyyyy. 😀
I think now that you've done a few of these and have the hang of it you should do this again for Perl. I'm a Perl programmer and the 1990s were the best scripting days for the language, IMHO.
There's a few more jokes you can put in here, too. One is having the programmer talk about how there will always be a need to debug other people's code, then look at the code, say "What the hell was this guy doing?" followed by "Who wrote this code anyway?" followed by "Oh, I wrote it twenty years ago!" Cause that's actually happened to me. :D
Also, do a "I'm not sure I can figure this out, I'll just email Larry." Larry Wall was notorious in the early days for engaging with the community at a time when other languages didn't have that kind of access to the developer. As other people started maintaining and helping with the code, they continued that tradition.
Also, it's fun to criticize how many lines of PHP it takes to do something with only one line in Perl. In fact, Perl is one of those scripting languages where I often find myself trying to do everything in just one line of code. I don't recommend this for newbies though, and honestly, PHP is more useful than Perl like 90% of the time for web applications anymore. Perl is really handy if you need to do a simple regex, though.
I feel like we've all had that experience when looking at our own code. That bit about one liners really brought me back.
‘“Y’all want something to drink? Well get ya self sumthin” 😂😂
The most useful script I have ever written was in Perl.
It is 14 lines long and converts EBCDIC into UTF-8.
It could have been shorter, but I was new.
Perl is amazing for rolling your own prettifiers and transpilers.
agreed. i used to be a damn good perl programmer back in the day. today, I only use Strawberry Perl for Windows, and only if I have to do some crazy text manipulation on some files or something.... Perl can be very useful on Windows. One time, I had a client with 3500+ users on a Windows NT (3 or 4 or some version) and I needed to get them onto a Windows 2003 AD server, and I didn't know their passwords, and I could ONLY get their social security numbers, to use the last 4 digits, to create a unique password for each user, from an ANCIENT Unix system called Ultrix (i think?)..... needless to say, Windows AND Unix perl, made it possible. Even Waaaaaay back then. Today, it still has niche uses on the server and i'll always love it! :)
Late to this conversation, but thanks for pointing out the utility of Perl. It’s just a tool and it’s terribly jaded to compare it to languages it was never meant to compete with. Like a religion, the only thing wrong with a programming (or scripting) language is it’s fundamentalist following.
Yeah, it's pretty good for data munging. I used it a little bit for graduate work just to see what the language was like. It's not elegant, but it's convenient for certain tasks.
Programmed in Perl for many years. The language is wonderful. Still wish I was allowed to use it. The whole video is a riot!!! Awesome job.
Perl 6 killed it. IMO. It created confusion. Companies either remained on Perl 5 or migrated to something else. Often Python.
Is this encryption?
... It's a new Perl script I'm working on 😂
still using PERL today lol
I missed the "there is more than one way to do it" shout-out in here.
I remember back when I started as technical lead and we had to interview a contractor to help with some cobol. A guy showed up so old he could have been my grandpa. What can you ask a guy who is coming to work after retirement from IBM? Instant hire.! 😎
Was that...in...19....
@@AmstradExin ...ah, uh... Reagan administration!
"What happend in the 80's stays in the int 80's ...........except for perl"
Perl is still my goto language for text-manipulation tasks, horses for courses, then C++ and C# for most other work.
is pretty good at processing data, for projects like ERP systems is actually the best solution
Learned perl in the 90s for early web/CGI scripting, but will always treasure it for regular expressions. Well-written regex in a parser is like gold.
"Is this encryption? Its a purl script I'm working on." 😂😂😂😂
“everyone says perl is dead, not while Im still here!” even a non-programmer bursts to laugh to that truth )))
Perl: We want our programming language to feel like natural language.
Also Perl: REGEX FTW!
Perl is like a thermos, it keeps cold things cold and it keeps warm things not impossible.
Perl gives me the flexibility to write unreadable code, if that's what I want to do. It's also flexible enough to let me write with a clarity I can't match with other languages.
Perl was the first language I really used for anything useful, and I began using it back in 1998 when I started using RedHat 5.2. For years, the only two only languages I used with frequency was Perl and TCL.
What I quickly realised was that savvy Perl'ers had a tendency to write really condensed code, and when I also noticed the genre "Perl golfers", where the purpose was to write code in a single line if possible. For a beginner, reading that code blew a fuse or two quite often, and it was impossible to understand what is going on.
I loved it for its versatility, and when discovering CPAN a whole new world opened up.
Wouldn't define it as a pretty language, as it is possible to write the worlds least comprehensible code with Perl - but still has a special place in my heart ❤
Dude. I wrote production software in Bash. I am not sure if that company is still around, but my stuff was working great at the time that I left.
This one is the best "I wrote the black pearl". Keep it up! Please do one with C#, dotnet, visual basic, pascal
The interview itself was written in Perl, nobody understand it.
LMAOOO
Cracked up at 'regular expression'... I can remember me telling people 'regular expression' all the time when learning Perl.
I love perl
"I remember back in nineteen-"
_Confused looks intensify_
Coded scripts and web backend with Perl more than 10 years ago. I kept in touch with my ex boss and sometimes I help with something... I can tell that some of my really old Perl code still is running some backend stuff.
Same here. Perl brought beautiful solutions to tough immediate problems.
It's insane that with such a large and vital industry almost a century old at this point, no one outside it has figured out yet that we don't know what we're doing.
Whatever do you mean? This is our career how can we not know what this is about
i know
i'm onto you guys
i know oop is a waste of time
@@heartache5742 I work with Haskell professionally so you're preaching to the choir! ;)
"We Really Don't Know How to Compute!" by Sussman.
th-cam.com/video/HB5TrK7A4pI/w-d-xo.html
@@PixelOutlaw love sussman :)
I am working with Perl in a ERP System where it is used for customizing the Standard Software with a nice Qt based GUI. And yes I am 50+ 😊
The truth IS that python IS almost as old as Perl.
Yall want something to drink? Well git yourself something to drink then. 😂😂
I use perl since 1995 and i still love it today, even my company has moved away from it
Back in 19 eh.
@@incremental_failure
Ist this that Bad? Despite being old, it ist a good language.
Perl is really handy for prototyping algorithms for C code. Perl's really expressive so boilerplate and ancillary code are quick to write (no need to worry about declarations, string functions, etc.). The actual algorithm being developed can be written in a C-like syntax. Once it's been implemented and tested converting it to actual C code is very easy.
It’s kind of funny how most here have no idea that you can use Moose/Moo, DBIC, Test::More, Mojolious or Dancer and write a modern microservice with Perl.
Yep. Most haven't the foggiest clue, but it doesn't stop them from commenting out of sheer ignorance. Amazing.
DBIC, probably the only ORM in existence that enables SQL injections.
TH-cam better make this guy popular
I am this person. Also I have worked with a ton of these people. Also perl still rocks :)
Accurate, because I could only understand about half of what the guy was saying.
This has got to be one of my all time favorite skits
I write Perl for a living, and when I interview for Perl jobs, I usually say "I wouldn't recommend writing a new application in Perl" at least once during the interview. The companies that use it are stuck with it for some of their most mission-critical processes and systems. Most of it is a shit show of horrible spaghetti-code. Being a "Perl Expert," does keep you employed, though. With the market being like it is right now, I feel kind of lucky that I can even get a job, so yay for Perl!
Used to do a lot in Perl.
I learned the hard way not to try to larger applications in it, but it's still my go-to language, when I find bash annoying.
And as a "practical extraction and report language" for text based data it's still a faster tool than, say, PHP, Python, Ruby...
It's faster because it uses different (monolithic) thought process to achieve the same goal. It's not the language itself but the logics behind it. Nevertheless, it's a lot more fallible if it's done the wrong way though XD XD XD.
It's fast but it's probably best to use python with pandas and/or numpy.
I remember back in 1919... Hollerith Machines.
I remember stealing CGI Perl scripts from Matt’s Script Archive back in 19…
(That site STILL hasn’t changed a bit! 😨)
In 19.....
"That's a name I've not heard in a long time... a long time"
I remember these high school nerds be like so amazed by Perl like it was the holy grail, so exotic. Everything could be done better or more optimized or more elite in Perl, but in reality, who would do that? Taught me everything I needed to know about Perl. Btw what accent is this? Just about as understandable as my mechatronics prof's Soviet-era Ukrainian accent.
CTO at my first job was perl and emacs user. We were full stack perl lmao. One liners and everything. This mixed with the emacs video 10000% him
REGULAR EXPRESSIONS -- Yessir!
The **ONLY** inaccurate part of this video is that he wasn't drinking Jolt Cola
It's a shame this one isn't the most popular
Year 2022 and I was hired for Front end. Then I got to know I had to write my codes with Perl.......
RIP
"Is this encryption?"
"It's a new Perl script that I'm working on"
"I remember back in 19...."
I remember back in 19 as well.
Always remembered.
Usually the more you code in a language the more you enjoy it and appreciate its features and caveats. Perl is one of those languages that, the more you code in it, the more often you say, “y tho?”
Learning to appreciate its features is just part of learning a language. But use a language enough, and you'll start to notice more and more of its shortcomings.
Perl is not any different.
@@davidwuhrer6704 It’s been the opposite for me.
@@ryan_layne How so?
@@davidwuhrer6704 Learning to appreciate features and patterns has come from learning many many languages for many years and using a language enough I start to notice all the things that suck about it. Perl is what happens when you have to keep backwards compatibility and try to shoehorn modern language features into an outdated and poorly designed language. To be clear, there are things that suck about most if not all languages. I just find that perl has more suckage than just about every other language I use. Sure, this is just my opinion, but I can make a list of things that i personally think are dumb about many languages based on experience with many languages. Perl's list is quite long, hehe.
@@ryan_layne Yes, I don't see what the difference is.
I have translated some scripts FROM Python TO Perl and the result was so much easier to understand and maintain that I was able to hand the code to others to modify to their needs. Perl is made for scripts and has several scripting features in the language that Python can only do tediously.
I did the same for the same reasons. Rewrote python to perl, because it is easier to maintain and understand. And some Java apps had the same fate.
@@iarde3422 You two are the only people in the universe who find Perl more readable and maintainable than Python. Unless you're doing lots of shell stuff or heavy text transformations, I don't see how it's possible.
@@paulie-g Count me as # 3.
All the Perl programmers that I know are actually super badass punk rock types.
You may sit at the cool table during lunch, today. ^5
I love even the title comes with a troll with the word “rare”😆
there are people still using perl professionally, because they can't be replaced ! lol
"I remember back in 1919 when I was 19..." 🤣
This guy... I tell you... This guy gets it man
Walter Willis: How do you know what files got imported?
*throws two dice* 🤣🤣🤣🤣
I started a remote job where I write Perl last year. It's been a decade since I used the language and it's still awful.
(To be fair, at least back then, it was a definite step up from PHP)
Perl 7? Was supposed to have a release candidate a year ago - that still hasn't happened And that's how things
are going *after* the whole Perl 6 debacle all those years back.
I guess you just have to be in awe of a language that still doesn't have function signatures enabled by default
in 2022. And it isn't even clear if those will be enabled by default in Perl 7 once it drops in 2035.
I implemented decorators using attributes, because that's syntactically the cleanest way I found - and was told
by the developer who did much of the work on the Perl attribute system that the attribute system is garbage and
that I shouldn't depend on it because it might drastically change - nice. I still use that decorator implementation
in production because I know that by the time the attribute system sees a meaningful refactor civilization will
have collapsed anyhow.
Also one of the Perl core devs is one of three people I ever put on /ignore in IRC because holy shit I have never
talked to anyone so obnoxious in my entire life - and I have talked to conspiracy theorists, alcoholics,
schizophrenics and various combinations thereof.
This is amazing. The creator of this video should interview you. The IRC bit would be fantastic.
Your yapping sounds like you are a leftist liberal.
where is your company located?
use v5.36; -> signatures are enabled
The fact that this Perl dev is obnoxious is definitely relevant. I know a Rust dev who is not obnoxious. And you know a Perl dev who is. So I'm gonna learn Rust. I'm glad I read the comments.
ironically learns perl
Yeah.. make fun of Perl, then explain why you need NVM so you can run five different versions of Node on one server. There are worse things than having to modify a script which has been running perfectly for the last twenty years on the legacy server. I haven't even checked what version of Perl I was running since I fixed the last Y2K bug back in 19100.
"[S]o I can write scripts no one can read or no one can understand."
As a Perl programmer back in the long ago times, I smiled when I heard that.
I think the point of the 'I remember back in 19......' quote was that they cut all his anecdotes out in editing. :D
or maybe hes so old that he can only remember 19 and not even the full date :D
It's likely supposed to be an oldtimer getting forgetful about the specific year, and only getting as far as "19... ah..." because it was 1980s/90s. As someone from that time, I take offense 😅
You convinced me to go back to Perl (it was my first language in ±2003).
this is kurt russel at that artic research station 20 years after the end of "the thing"
This is legitimately just very funny
The index finger to the temple is too damn funny.
What a great video! Look at how you've created a community 👍
And the comments are priceless. Thanks to everyone who's shared their pain with us all here! LOL
At least the the standard out function has a reasonable name.
Ohhh yes! yet another masterpiece from my favorite weird guy on TH-cam.
the dice roll murdered me lmfaoaoooo
“Perl poet” LOL
"well gitcha seves sumthin.."
Dad???
Y'all writing in past tense is telling. But pretty perl is possible, I've seen it.
I just ran into a perl script the other day. This is too true. I had to come back and say it again lol
What perl programmer would be using pico/nano? They'd be having a vi vs emacs argument and the folks using pico would be ushered out of the room.
Perl is such an awesome language for automating so many tasks. It took me much much longer to implement a script in python telnet and ftp transfer system software (not written in Perl) offsite to my company's contract mfg and test facility than it would have with Perl. I wanted some GUI features... and ya can't do that in Perl. I still write Perl scripts all the time, and i treat it like a "real" programming language, with meaningful names for scalers, etc rather than composing those cryptic lines of code that turned the world against the language. there's no way I could remember all the crap some of these scripts do otherwise. Every tool has its use, as do most prog langs I've used. Perl is the best adjustable wrench ever invented... kinda like that spatula SpongeBob flies in with during the anchovies episode... just don't be cute and try writing any object oriented programs and you and me will have no problems. LOL
We've done exactly that. Our products are entirely written in Perl in an object oriented way😂
Perl is a good language. Yes, it has some problems, but it is still amazing at quickly building a text-munching machine or rewriting complex configurations. Yes, sure I could do that that in any language, but having a language that works everywhere makes enterprise much easier
" It took me much much longer to implement a script in python "
then you suck in python I automate stuff like these while pentesting a target with python
@@ko-Daegu Oh, I never claimed to be any kind of expert at Python. I'm a hardware guy, without all the formal training a comp sci or SE gets. I picked up a majority of my "skills" out of need, and figuring out how to use OO syntax for implementing telnet in Py was not easy. There are far more examples of folks using Perl to do weird sh!t than Python. Fast and weird is what I need to post process simulation results and automate other tasks... Just a little more ammo for ya, Ko, should you really want to keep trolling me. Python is really good in so many ways, like the incredible 3rd party package support. I just don't like writing it. Perl is a much more natural fit for my work. Be well, my greeky amigos.
GUI can be pretty simple in perl. Load your CPAN library for Gtk and you're all set.
Given that some banks still use EBCDIC, you should have great job security as a Perl dev.
It's funny because my colleagues baby boomers actually express themselves like that "You know... back in the 80s, 90s etc." LOL
Yeah. That's real funny, kid. Thanks for sharing.
When I was a Junior programmer my first language I learned on the job was Perl. I don't think there's many places using this now. But I do like the language for it's Regular Expressions.
Regex hell.
@@incremental_failure Nah, when properly written, regex is an elegant, fast parsing solution
Regular expressions are useful, but every language has them now.
Python is one that has them, and combines them nicely with its other features. E.g. re.finditer() to iterate over matches.
Perl's RE engine is very highly regarded and is why PCRE exists. It's used by default or available as a plugin in many programming languages.
PERL programmer here - loved this.
Wise words from an old man.
Perl Poet! That is so spot-on.
Looks like a typical Computerphile guest to me
I don't get it? Why they keep perpetuating, that Perl is hard to read and understand? It's one of the easiest to read and understand languages.
Because ignorance is strong on the uninformed that believe everything they read in social media.
Very inspirational.
I am now learning Data Structures in Perl 💀
i love how he's using nano and in light mode
That's the one thing that bugged me. It would have been pico, and most programmers of that time would have been arguing over vi vs emacs and not even considered pico as a viable editor.
I bought a Perl book in my language to learn when I was in secondary becuz I want to learn hacking and articles on the internet say that Perl is one of the language you need to learn to become a hacker 🤣