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.
(Score: 2) by legont on Friday September 20 2019, @01:01AM (2 children)
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)
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.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by legont on Friday September 20 2019, @05:54PM
Yes, my thoughts exactly.
"Wealth is the relentless enemy of understanding" - John Kenneth Galbraith.