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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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Perl Is Still The Goddess For Text Manipulation
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(Score: 5, Interesting) by legont on Friday September 20 2019, @01:22AM
From what I see the biggest problem with Perl is that it just works. I have mission critical half a million lines of code that was not maintained since developers were fired in 2008 crash and it still works. Nobody at the office realizes the miracle because the thing works and does not bother anybody with outages. The result? We lost Perl in-house expertise.
Java shit was broken numerous times during this time and management had to invest in Java developers, hire them, train them, budget total rewrites multiple times. Hence, there are now thousands of java "experts" in the office and they have to be because otherwise it would simply die. Meantime only a few Perl ones remain and there is not enough man power to upgrade the code for the new environment by two orders of magnitude. They actually want me to rewrite mentioned 500,000 lines of code with help of two off-shores, while it was originally developed by a dozen of guys each one smarter than I.
Kids, if you are reading it, make sure your product breaks often. Don't repeat our mistake. Never develop maintenance free one.
"Wealth is the relentless enemy of understanding" - John Kenneth Galbraith.