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Ask HN: Is Perl making a comeback?

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Re: Ask HN: Is Perl making a comeback?

#11

Post by danhoc01 »

lazyjones wrote: post #9
danhoc01 wrote: post #7

I was a Perl hacker for almost three years. It was my first dynamic, interpreted language and is what made me fall in love with writing software. Writing Perl was when I first felt that I was hacking rather than programming. The largest problem is that it's largely unreadable, a write-only language. There's too much magic in Perl. Perl 6 is making strides to correct this, but the culture of Perl is what makes me beli…

> * the culture of Perl is what makes me believe that it will never be a viable choice over other dynamic, interpreted languages.* What's wrong with Perl culture? Perl as a language and as an implementation has many weaknesses (esp. maintainability), but I've never seen any reasonable criticism of its culture as a whole. Only very recently have I noticed a somewhat annoying trend towards evangelism, I attribute this…

Nothing is wrong with culture. I love the culture. It's just that there is an emphasis on doing things in clever ways, not necessarily readable or maintainable ways.

The average thread on PerlMonks (at least when I was a heavy reader) eventually turns to code golf. The language and culture both encourage that. I had a lot of fun writing clever code, and it really helped me understand data structures and efficiency at a deep level. Trying to force that culture of expression and code gymnastics to write a maintainable codebase just isn't worth it in my opinion. A language with more constraints and less magic will benefit a team trying to come together to build a product.

I see Python as being somewhere between Perl (express yourself in clever ways) and Ruby (I know it's attributed to Rails, but omakase) in terms of culture. That's why I love Python.

Re: Ask HN: Is Perl making a comeback?

#12

Post by chromatic »

danhoc01 wrote: post #11
lazyjones wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> * the culture of Perl is what makes me believe that it will never be a viable choice over other dynamic, interpreted languages.* What's wrong with Perl culture? Perl as a language and as an implementation has many weaknesses (esp. maintainability), but I've never seen any reasonable criticism of its culture as a whole. Only very recently have I noticed a somewhat annoying trend towards evangelism, I attribute this…

Nothing is wrong with culture. I love the culture. It's just that there is an emphasis on doing things in clever ways, not necessarily readable or maintainable ways. The average thread on PerlMonks (at least when I was a heavy reader) eventually turns to code golf. The language and culture both encourage that. I had a lot of fun writing clever code, and it really helped me understand data structures and efficiency at…

The average thread on PerlMonks (at least when I was a heavy reader) eventually turns to code golf.

The voting system of PerlMonks rewards this.

Trying to force that culture of expression and code gymnastics to write a maintainable codebase just isn't worth it in my opinion.

Don't adopt a voting system like that of PerlMonks in your business, I guess. Or else hire responsible adults. That seems straightforward enough.

Re: Ask HN: Is Perl making a comeback?

#13

Post by melling »

No, people just started jamming in Perl headlines in the past few days. Anyone can submit, after all. It's the 3rd most popular dynamic language. One of Perl's claim's to fame was CPAN, but at this point there's probably more than enough Python or Ruby library support. Ruby and Python also have also JVM support. You'll still find Perl in a lot of legacy software because it was king for a decade. These days, I would probably just go with Python or Ruby on any new project because it's easier to find developers.

Finally, consider if you want to outsource on oDesk, for example. There's a better chance of getting readable Python than readable Perl.

Re: Ask HN: Is Perl making a comeback?

#14

Post by davidgerard »

danhoc01 wrote: post #7

I was a Perl hacker for almost three years. It was my first dynamic, interpreted language and is what made me fall in love with writing software. Writing Perl was when I first felt that I was hacking rather than programming. The largest problem is that it's largely unreadable, a write-only language. There's too much magic in Perl. Perl 6 is making strides to correct this, but the culture of Perl is what makes me beli…

Perl 6 will first be released for HURD, and the first application will be Duke Nukem Forever.

Re: Ask HN: Is Perl making a comeback?

#15

Post by lazyjones »

danhoc01 wrote: post #11
lazyjones wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> * the culture of Perl is what makes me believe that it will never be a viable choice over other dynamic, interpreted languages.* What's wrong with Perl culture? Perl as a language and as an implementation has many weaknesses (esp. maintainability), but I've never seen any reasonable criticism of its culture as a whole. Only very recently have I noticed a somewhat annoying trend towards evangelism, I attribute this…

Nothing is wrong with culture. I love the culture. It's just that there is an emphasis on doing things in clever ways, not necessarily readable or maintainable ways. The average thread on PerlMonks (at least when I was a heavy reader) eventually turns to code golf. The language and culture both encourage that. I had a lot of fun writing clever code, and it really helped me understand data structures and efficiency at…

> The average thread on PerlMonks (at least when I was a heavy reader) eventually turns to code golf

That might not be representative of the Perl community as a whole really ... Perl is used in corporate environments where "code golf" or "super clever" solutions will get you odd looks, Perl isn't an excuse for writing unmaintainable code, even if it's straight from PerlMonks. Books like "Modern Perl" by chromatic and software like Perl::Critic have moved the focus from writing "clever" to writing maintainable code in the last couple of years. In my opinion, it was too little and too late though and lacking supporting changes in Perl's implementation to reverse the trend (i.e. losing users).

For people who have touched saner languages (like Go) in the mean time, it's just hopeless to keep messing about with Perl, no matter how disciplined people are and how supporting the toolchain is (I run Perl::Critic and perl -MO=Lint -c before every commit and it takes longer than "go build", which checks code much more thoroughly).

Re: Ask HN: Is Perl making a comeback?

#16

Post by bliti »

It never left. You won't read about it here because its not in. Remember that this community revolves around a younger generation of programmers that learned to build web cruds with rails. Not a bad thing. They just see Perl as old.

Re: Ask HN: Is Perl making a comeback?

#17

Post by tarpden »

bliti wrote: post #16

It never left. You won't read about it here because its not in . Remember that this community revolves around a younger generation of programmers that learned to build web cruds with rails. Not a bad thing. They just see Perl as old .

Perl 5 maintains that perception because of its refusal to break backward compatibility and fix longstanding warts.

Re: Ask HN: Is Perl making a comeback?

#18

Post by chromatic »

tarpden wrote: post #17
bliti wrote: post #16

It never left. You won't read about it here because its not in . Remember that this community revolves around a younger generation of programmers that learned to build web cruds with rails. Not a bad thing. They just see Perl as old .

Perl 5 maintains that perception because of its refusal to break backward compatibility and fix longstanding warts.

That was true until about 5.12. Since 2011, Perl's been much more aggressive about fixing warts and breaking backwards compatibility in intelligent ways (where it's getting in the way of something better or actively harmful).

Re: Ask HN: Is Perl making a comeback?

#19

Post by lsiebert »

Hacker News represents a VERY small segment of the computer programming population. That's fine, but don't be confused if the echo chamber occasionally produces weird results. Perl is still in use in major companies, for web stuff and system administration, but also game development, hardware simulation testing and other cool things. It's not sexy, and it seems arcane to programmers used to more modern languages. But there are things happening in it.
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