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Mark Jason Dominus
Personal blog · hop.perl.plover.comprogrammingwriting
Mark Jason Dominus writes Higher-Order Perl, a personal blog at hop.perl.plover.com about programming and writing. Since 2007, 58 different Hacker News readers have linked it 74 times, most often “Higher Order Perl”. No feed was found, so read it on the site itself.
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74mentions?
58HN people?
2007–2025first – last linked?
Most-linked posts?
- Higher Order Perl21 people · 25 mentions · first linked 2007-08-16
- Higher-Order Perl is available for free as a PDF15 people · 15 mentions · first linked 2008-12-10
- Higher-Order Perl8 people · 11 mentions · first linked 2018-08-10
- Higher-Order Perl: Transforming Programs with Programs6 people · 6 mentions · first linked 2019-03-18
- /book/pdf/HigherOrderPerl.pdf2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2011-06-02
- Higher-Order Perl (2005)2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2021-03-30
- Program Goals achieved2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2008-05-15
- /2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2013-10-01
What Hacker News says?
Kind of, Perl was one of the first languages to bring FP to the masses, while Lisp and ML languages were hardly looked up by them. See https://hop.perl.plover.com/book/
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on “Open-source Zig book”Submitted Higher-Order Perl is available for free as a PDF as a story · 115 points
HN discussionI think you should revisit perl. My first job writing perl was in 2005 or 2006, and it was not a good language for an eager idiot without guidance. After a couple years, I started getting it, and it became one of my favorite languages. I think it was my coworker who told me to read https://hop.perl.plover.com/ and it blew my mind and made me start to rethink how I was approaching code. With the languages that I'd be…
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on “Perl 7 is going to be Perl 5.32, mostly”Submitted Higher-Order Perl: Transforming Programs with Programs as a story · 17 points
HN discussionMark Jason Dominus also says the same thing about Perl in his Higher Order Perl book [1][2] and goes onto show that Perl has 6 of the 7 features that Norvig describes has making Lisp different [3]. [1] http://hop.perl.plover.com [2] Perl is much more like Lisp than it is like C (from Preface) [3] ... the book "Paradigms of Artificial Intelligence Programming", by Peter Norvig, includes a section titled "What Makes L…
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on “Tessel: The end of web development as we know it”Submitted Higher-Order Perl (2005) as a story · 16 points
HN discussionPerl is far more than anything you can ever do in Bash, even the basic things. Then there is also the famous Tom Christiansen Essay on C-shell: https://www-uxsup.csx.cam.ac.uk/misc/csh.html You can even do Lispy things in Perl. You can do functional stuff: https://hop.perl.plover.com/ You can do unicode regexes in Perl: https://perldoc.perl.org/perlunicode.html You can do large file processing in Perl: https://www.p…
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on “Bash Infinity: Standard library and boilerplate framework for Bash”Submitted Higher-Order Perl as a story · 6 points
HN discussionI know it's probably totally unnecessary but still, here's a link to the free download page of the book [1]. Together with Modern Perl (also free for download [2]) this book completely changed my view of Perl. It helped me see through the misconceptions built (most of the times unintentionally) around this language and made me even switch from Python to Perl. If you're interested, spend a few minutes browsing throug…
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on “The shittiest project I ever worked on”Submitted "Higher Order Perl" book now available free online (PDF is 2nd ed.) -- kudos to Mark Jason Dominus as a story · 5 points
HN discussionI loathe perl still (based on having to SSH (or telnet?) into people's systems and debug their perl scripts in the 90s) but, Higher Order Perl, https://hop.perl.plover.com/ is a truly excellent introduction to the power of functions that generate functions, more accessible and more immediately useful than Paul Graham's On Lisp. The lessons are immediately applicable at least to Javascript and Python. Strongly typed…
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on “Perl code that is syntactically correct only on Fridays”Submitted Higher-Order Perl as a story · 4 points
HN discussionmjd's Higher Order Perl should be on most people's must-read list: http://hop.perl.plover.com/book/
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on “A list of free programming books”Submitted Higher Order Perl as a story · 4 points
HN discussionAnd you can read it for nothing, if you are interested: http://hop.perl.plover.com/book/pdf/HigherOrderPerl.pdf
Comment linking /book/pdf/HigherOrderPerl.pdf
on “Why I’m Learning Perl 6”Submitted Higher-Order Perl (2005) as a story · 3 points
HN discussionAbsolutely, Higher-Order Perl was quite famous back in the day: https://hop.perl.plover.com
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on “Everything Is Just Functions: 1 week with David Beazley and SICP”Submitted Program Goals achieved as a story · 3 points
HN discussionPer https://hop.perl.plover.com/book/ he used a modified version of the "POD" markup associated with Perl.
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on “Why my book can be downloaded for free (2014)”Submitted Higher-Order Perl -- Free Online Version as a story · 3 points
HN discussionWell, the Guy is pretty clever. I think, given the tools, he could produce high quality work. http://hop.perl.plover.com/ - seriously clever.
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on “Why I like Java”Submitted Higher-Order Perl as a story · 2 points
HN discussion"It is a Perl guy, so ignore his opinion" :-) I learned more about you than about Dominus with that comment. Here is a link to his well received book, by the way: http://hop.perl.plover.com/book/ (But the book you should probably look at to understand the world better, is "Perl best practices".) Edit: fuzzix -- you are certainly right about most useful modern books, I was making a point to what I comment on. The idi…
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on “Why I like Java”Submitted Higher Order Perl as a story · 2 points
HN discussion> but you got no language support as with __iter__, other than using tie callbacks. What are tie callbacks, if not (creaky) language support? Also the perl way would be to implement infinite streams, ala MJD's HOP[0]. [0]: http://hop.perl.plover.com/book/pdf/06InfiniteStreams.pdf
Comment linking /book/pdf/06InfiniteStreams.pdf
on ““Design Patterns” Aren't (2002)”Read Higher Order Perl, think it's usable for Python & Ruby as well.. (available as a free pdf now) http://hop.perl.plover.com/book/ Edit: Here's the TOC: 1) Recursion and callbacks 2) Dispatch tables 3) Caching and memoization 4) Iterators 5) From recursion to iterators 6) Infinite streams 7) Higher-order functions and currying 8) Parsing 9) Declarative programming
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on “My GF learned to code in 3 months. This is what she came up with.”It gets even better, apparently! http://hop.perl.plover.com/book/ > This is the publisher's own PDF proof of the second version, which was sent to the printers in August 2005. > This is better than the bootleg copies available from download sites (...): It is the complete text of the second printing, which incorporates many minor corrections; the bootleg copies are all bootlegs of the first printing. > Higher-Order…
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on “Anagram Scoring”Then I can highly recommend "Higher Order Perl" by M.J. Dominus (ebook for free on http://hop.perl.plover.com/book/ but the printed edition is well worth paying for too). It essentially teaches you functional programming in Perl.
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on “How to improve your programming skills”Higher Order Perl: http://hop.perl.plover.com/ On Lisp: http://www.paulgraham.com/onlisp.html Also http://it-ebooks.info/ has a wide selection of free ebooks with ads.
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on “Ask HN: What are your recommended reads that are available for free?”And which is available online at: http://hop.perl.plover.com/book/
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on “Perl is 26 Today”
