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posted by janrinok on Thursday September 19 2019, @03:09PM   Printer-friendly
from the perl-one-liners dept.

Back in May, writer Jun Wu told in her blog how Perl excels at text manipulation. She often uses it to tidy data sets, a necessity as data is often collected with variations and cleaning it up before use is a necessity. She goes through many one-liners which help make that easy.

Having old reliables is my key to success. Ever since I learned Perl during the dot com bubble, I knew that I was forever beholden to its powers to transform.

You heard me. Freedom is the word here with Perl.

When I'm coding freely at home on my fun data science project, I rely on it to clean up my data.

In the real world, data is often collected with loads of variations. Unless you are using someone's "clean" dataset, you better learn to clean that data real fast.


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  • (Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Thursday September 19 2019, @08:59PM (3 children)

    by JoeMerchant (3937) on Thursday September 19 2019, @08:59PM (#896254)

    Yeah, but once one finishes building it, one discovers that he rebuild Perl.

    If you're that heavy into what Perl does, by all means, use it. For me, it's a bigger PITA to "shell out" to get access to Perl than it is to recode in C++, on the rare occasions it is necessary. If I really loved Perl so much but still needed to be in C++, I'd make a dedicated wrapper for Perl and get full access that way.

    BTW: anyone considering PyQt for anything bigger than a toy project, my recommendation is: don't. But, then, that's pretty much my recommendation for Python all over - sure, there are some pretty impressive "large" things out there mostly based in Python - like trac, which I have happily used for over 10 years now, but... for the most part, unless the coding team is super disciplined, Python degenerates into a ball of snakes much faster than any of the C derivatives I have ever worked with.

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  • (Score: 2) by legont on Friday September 20 2019, @01:01AM (2 children)

    by legont (4179) on Friday September 20 2019, @01:01AM (#896323)

    My main choice for a long time was C (plain, without ++). For quick and dirty things I'd use AWK and I am talking here not about one liners, but full blown software of a few hundreds or even thousands lines of code. There was even an AWK compiler that one guy wrote and was selling for $99 that did a very good job.

    At some point I discovered Perl, gave it a try, and it replaced AWK, even compiled version of it, for me. Time passing, I realized that I pretty much stopped using C except in rare special occasions and that Perl would cover everything for me.

    Management would be forcing at different times Java, dotnet, Python and so on, but so far at the end Perl could not be replaced. There is another attempt going right now and this time they may succeed, but let's see...

    I appreciate your comment about Python, but if you were asked to replace a huge Perl project with something modern that fresh college kids would like, what would you recommend?

    --
    "Wealth is the relentless enemy of understanding" - John Kenneth Galbraith.
    • (Score: 4, Insightful) by JoeMerchant on Friday September 20 2019, @01:11PM (1 child)

      by JoeMerchant (3937) on Friday September 20 2019, @01:11PM (#896478)

      if you were asked to replace a huge Perl project with something modern that fresh college kids would like, what would you recommend?

      Perl.

      I worked for almost a decade converting fresh college kids' code (Matlab, Python, and strangely: a fair bit of Fortran) to C++ so that their broken toys could be sold to real customers.

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      • (Score: 2) by legont on Friday September 20 2019, @05:54PM

        by legont (4179) on Friday September 20 2019, @05:54PM (#896583)

        Yes, my thoughts exactly.

        --
        "Wealth is the relentless enemy of understanding" - John Kenneth Galbraith.