Hmm. That Perl doesn't work. I'm sure that was in my copy of Learning Perl, let me go look it up.

The book has a wholly different method?

Apparently Perl has changed since this book was published in 1991? Huh. How dare.

@mwl You've got the 1st edition Camel Book, I assume? Which covers Perl 4, which was replaced circa ... 1992? Oh boy was that a fun learning curve!

@cstross

Yep, first edition "with minor corrections." I studied it between support calls as I worked nights on my first tech job.

I claim I learned programming on zx81 BASIC (which is true), but the Camel Book made me a sysadmin.

Part of its brilliance was that it's about 250 pages. Nobody wants a doorstop when they're first learning a topic.

My tech books now? About 250 pages.

@mwl I tried doing something in perl recently, after almost a decade of no perl — and perl has changed, man. I am sure it's not me.

Still emotionally processing that.

@m Perl has added stuff, but my primordial perl5 still works fine.

@mwl Yep, I have the original first printing! Signed by Larry!

But Perl 5 is a very different beast. It broke continuity with the previous package system but added references and thus several different OOP paradigms and a HUGE range of extras. Embedded whitespace and comments inside regular expressions? Lexically scoped variables? References (aka pointers)? And modules with calling conventions and function prototypes and ...

@mwl

Now if you had used awk(1) instead, code from the 1970s would still run just fine… 😛

@cstross

cool!

and: oh, yeah, perl5 broke things. More of a learning curb.

I wrote perl4 for years after perl5 came out. Most often, I still do.

But 2005-ish I needed a Radius auth system that re-prompted for passwords every 15 minutes, and dragged myself through the Radius modules rather than write my own.

@mwl @m That’s quite a feat. The past few years it seems like each release has deprecations that hit formerly normal stuff. We’ve had a couple of these hit #SpamAssassin hard.

@grumpybozo @m

no, it just means my code is so simple and kludgy they can't deprecate it.

@mwl Makes sense, that they would take it out if it doesn’t work.

@jmtd @mwl That's probably the norm. And I just don't remember perl well, and started from a bad example with unfamiliar, but correct, syntax. All that TIMTOWTDI is not always optimal.

@mwl At one point I was very fluent in Perl 4 and stumbling through Perl 5 as it was being developed. Then I stopped doing much scripting for years in Perl moving to Python.

I had need of a quick script about two years back and the code that came out of my fingers simply didn't work. The language had changed too much. The only reason I didn't pick Python at the time was because, like most ugly reasons to use Perl, what I really wanted was PCRE and not to need sed.