Years ago I was pretty heavily into Perl. Such that every time I had to do something, or needed to automate something, my first thoughts were, "hmm, how would I do that in Perl?" or "Perl could do that!". I would then fire up my editor, get something functionally working and be happy. Don't get me wrong though, my love of Perl also came with its dislike of some things. For instance, documentation always left questions in my mind as to "how did they get to that point", or "how do they assume that?". And that led to me not being able to find the answers, and getting frustrated and moving to something else. Even people I know knew perl wouldn't know the answers, which made things even more difficult and hard to swallow.
I got to the point where I started to do coding in Python, as everyone around me at the time was using it, and well, peer pressure is a thing. I ended up really liking it, and have done it since. It was nice to have something so well documented, well supported and easy to use.
That was a number of years ago (at least 10, to be honest). Recently I got the bug to revisit perl, as I remembered the things I DID miss about it. So, having recently started playing around with Jupyter notebook as part of my continued Python learning, I found Jupyter also supports other languages as part of kernel plugins. I found the iperl plugin and decided to try to get it working. Ugh.... Not only does the current iteration NOT function as others had noted (as they, I believe, were using earlier versions. The posts were from several years ago), there are no current articles or posts about getting it working. In fact, the documentation on the Devel::IPerl module is quite sparse. The module also hasn't been touched in a long time.
So, here I am again, realizing that not only do the same, similar issues plague me again, but nothing seems to have changed, at least in my 'fighting' to try and get this functioning. Sure, I could just go and start coding in Perl, but a big part is asking, "Why?". Why when there are other things that I already know, and are much more well supported and used.
Perl still holds a placeholder due to things like its awesome regex's, and the things that it does do well. But at this point, I just doing have the wanting to expend a ton of time on something that I probably won't use daily. I have to plan my time better.
Oh well, back to my regularly scheduled program.
Happy Holidays, Everyone!
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment