[HN Gopher] Perlsecret - Perl secret operators and constants
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       Perlsecret - Perl secret operators and constants
        
       Author : mjs
       Score  : 42 points
       Date   : 2026-01-06 22:39 UTC (6 days ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (metacpan.org)
 (TXT) w3m dump (metacpan.org)
        
       | tasty_freeze wrote:
       | They one they named "baby cart" is something I have used to
       | interpolate expressions into a string. Eg                   print
       | "The sum is @{[1+2+3]}";
       | 
       | produces                   The sum is 6
       | 
       | instead of having to do:                   my $sum = 1+2+3;
       | print "The sum is $sum";
        
       | aldousd666 wrote:
       | 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.
        
       | teach wrote:
       | 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.
       | 
       | But sometimes one can still want to write poetry.
        
         | ktpsns wrote:
         | 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.
        
         | pavel_lishin wrote:
         | I'm having to write a lot more perl at work than I would prefer
         | to. It's still poetry, I suppose, but mostly of the bathroom-
         | stall variety.
        
         | wvenable wrote:
         | 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.
        
       | hekkle wrote:
       | OMG! The Goatsie operator =( )= is WILD! wilder than the glob
       | wild operator *
        
       | bolangi wrote:
       | 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.
        
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       (page generated 2026-01-12 23:00 UTC)