After first experiences with linux shell scripting, sed, awk, and C in 1990s, I found perl a welcome refuge. Way more featureful than DOS .bat files or BASIC! Its capabilities (perl + cpan) have always well exceeded my need for CS goodness. People do complain about the syntax, oddly, without mentioning the numerous ways perl was designed to make common tasks easy to do. The "use strict" pragma, and early adoption of testing culture are two examples where perl led the programming community. With the continued maturing of the language and ecosystem, I can only smile at the naysayers and wish them happiness whatever the language.
Perl was the first language I learned on my own after graduating university many years ago. I fell in love with it because of quirks like these and because code written in it can have a poetic quality you don't see often.
Now I am old and joyless and I want the code I write for work to be boring and unsurprising.
I learned Perl after trying C; and after struggling with `scanf` (not even getting to tokenization), the ease and speed of `while (<>) { @A = split;` for text-handling made it easy to fall in love. This (in the mid 90s, before Java, JavaScript, and C++ TR1) was also my first contact with associative arrays.
I was also drawn to the style of the Camel Book.
More than most other languages, Perl encouraged one-liners. When I later read PG's "Succinctness is power" essay, I thought of Perl.
This isn't the first time I've said this but also had an early-career job writing Perl code. And I actually got to the point where I liked it -- I mean I could see why it had a following.
Subsequently I've written code in almost every popular programming language and I will frequently go years between languages but even so I have very little trouble picking them back up. Even C++. But not Perl. It's just so weird with so many idiosyncrasies that I just can't remember it.
I discovered Perl directly after PHP before Web 2.0 days. Compared with the extreme, Java or (contemporary) Go, Perl codes (can) have a soul. Interestingly, modern ECMAScript (JS) brought in a few of the nice breweties from Perl world which I haven't seen a long time.
This isn't a special operator. This is just how "not" (!) works. In basically every language: C, C++, Javascript, Perl, etc., ! is the "not" operator so !12 gives you false (12 is truthy), and !!12 (not false) gives you true.
It's the same in languages that use different operators for "not". In python, the "not" operator is just the word not, and can write "not not 12" to get True. They didn't implement a special "not not" operator, anymore than Perl implemented a "!!" operator. They just implemented the basic ! / "not" operator.
Right, that's the point of TFA. It doesn't list "special" operators, it lists "secret" operators -- that is, operators combined from existing sigils that do clever things.
The "Venus" operator is a good example: it's the '+' addition operator! You just add zero to a value that's coercible into a number.
The Eskimo operators are also interesting: similar to a SQL injection attack, you use a close brace and an open brace to stop and start a new code block from within a string that's sent to the interpreter. Perl didn't invent open and close braces: hence the verb "discover" rather than "implement".
The whole page is a bit of a lark, and a good example of why some of us don't enjoy Perl!
Keep in mind that applying the logical NOT operator twice (using `!!`) converts any integer expression into a strict boolean.
Any non-zero value becomes `1`, and zero remains `0`. This is commonly used for boolean normalization
when the original expression yields a bitmask or arbitrary integer.
While the same result can be written as `(x != 0)`, the `!!x` idiom is concise, widely used in low-level
C code, guarantees a result of exactly `0` or `1`, and works well in macros and constant expressions.
Perk is... quite a thing. I think if you like programming because you like believing you have secret knowledge... go for it. Perk will scratch that itch. But I do not believe it beings you closer to the pantheon of God's. Ai n't gonna stop anyone from dancing with the Satyrs though, if that's your jam.
fun thing about this page: i have gemini in the browser and when I asked it 'why is the entire Wall Family naming these things?' it said it couldn't engage. Turns out 'goatse' is a forbidden word to Gemini.
Now I am old and joyless and I want the code I write for work to be boring and unsurprising.
But sometimes one can still want to write poetry.
I learned Perl after trying C; and after struggling with `scanf` (not even getting to tokenization), the ease and speed of `while (<>) { @A = split;` for text-handling made it easy to fall in love. This (in the mid 90s, before Java, JavaScript, and C++ TR1) was also my first contact with associative arrays.
I was also drawn to the style of the Camel Book.
More than most other languages, Perl encouraged one-liners. When I later read PG's "Succinctness is power" essay, I thought of Perl.
https://paulgraham.com/power.html
Subsequently I've written code in almost every popular programming language and I will frequently go years between languages but even so I have very little trouble picking them back up. Even C++. But not Perl. It's just so weird with so many idiosyncrasies that I just can't remember it.
I don't believe you.
This isn't a special operator. This is just how "not" (!) works. In basically every language: C, C++, Javascript, Perl, etc., ! is the "not" operator so !12 gives you false (12 is truthy), and !!12 (not false) gives you true.
It's the same in languages that use different operators for "not". In python, the "not" operator is just the word not, and can write "not not 12" to get True. They didn't implement a special "not not" operator, anymore than Perl implemented a "!!" operator. They just implemented the basic ! / "not" operator.
The "Venus" operator is a good example: it's the '+' addition operator! You just add zero to a value that's coercible into a number.
The Eskimo operators are also interesting: similar to a SQL injection attack, you use a close brace and an open brace to stop and start a new code block from within a string that's sent to the interpreter. Perl didn't invent open and close braces: hence the verb "discover" rather than "implement".
The whole page is a bit of a lark, and a good example of why some of us don't enjoy Perl!
Any non-zero value becomes `1`, and zero remains `0`. This is commonly used for boolean normalization when the original expression yields a bitmask or arbitrary integer.
While the same result can be written as `(x != 0)`, the `!!x` idiom is concise, widely used in low-level C code, guarantees a result of exactly `0` or `1`, and works well in macros and constant expressions.