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It's worse than that. You can't parse Perl without running arbitrary Perl code: https://www.perlmonks.org/?node_id=663504
http://www.perlmonks.org/?node_id=663504 Site's not ready for 21st century.
You know there was that recent Stackoverflow analysis that concluded that Perl was the most disliked programming language? It got me to thinking about how Perl managed to become quite so profoundly disliked, and I remembered these papers and thought that maybe things like this are the reason.
Perl is designed to make life easier for the guy who writes the code, not the one who reads it. The motto "there is more than one way to do it" is telling. It allows beginners to write code the way they are most familiar with and give experts a large toolbox to be most efficient in many situations. The trouble is that while the writer only needs to know a subset of the language, the reader has to know everything in o…
The more telling is you omitting the other half of the motto. TIMTOWTDIBSCINABTE
You know there was that recent Stackoverflow analysis that concluded that Perl was the most disliked programming language? It got me to thinking about how Perl managed to become quite so profoundly disliked, and I remembered these papers and thought that maybe things like this are the reason.
Perl used to have fans with meetups and so on. I've not heard of these for a long time. IMO three things killed Perl, leaving it as an unpopular legacy husk: - loss of ecosystem. The high points for Perl were CGI.pm and its use as a "super awk" by sysadmins. The first was obliterated by other ecosystems, better and worse: PHP, Rails, Node, Go, and so on. The second was obliterated by "servers are cattle not pets": pe…
I don't really think it was any of these. There's much simpler mechanics at play here: Perl's competition (Python and Ruby) has about the same expressiveness, but is much easier to learn, so for a long time very few people have chosen Perl to learn. There was simply not enough young blood to replace old timers that were retiring, dying, or migrating to other languages.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
>how Perl managed to become quite so profoundly disliked I'm guessing the reasons are actually more conspicuous than computer science concepts of "undecidability" since most working programmers don't read academic papers to judge whether they like/disklike a programming language. The conspicuous reasons seem to be a combination of: 1) PERL's usage of sigils.[1] One the one hand, it makes code compact and terse . On t…
Why do you write it in all capitals?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
>how Perl managed to become quite so profoundly disliked I'm guessing the reasons are actually more conspicuous than computer science concepts of "undecidability" since most working programmers don't read academic papers to judge whether they like/disklike a programming language. The conspicuous reasons seem to be a combination of: 1) PERL's usage of sigils.[1] One the one hand, it makes code compact and terse . On t…
Point 2 is kind of nonsense. The ecosystem is incredibly big and keeps up with most things. Name something then search here https://metacpan.org/ The main missing stuff is anyone marketing heavily their libraries and there being communities around them etc. Like probably no one knows what PDL is, even though it was around long before numpy+scipy etc. Before data science trended in the mind of hipster VCs and coders.…
I wasn't talking about the size of cpan because it's not relevant to my point. I was talking about Perl not being at the forefront of everyone's minds and being used as a 1st-class environment as computing entered new domains. E.g. instead of Sun or Microsoft taking an existing language like Perl and giving it a canonical IDE to let programmers write data entry GUI applications, they create Java & C# instead. When Google/Android decided on a development language for their smartphone SDK, they chose Java instead of Perl. It doesn't matter if cpan has mobile phone libraries now.
You seem to be taking my observations about Perl as some sort of veiled attack. I'm just reporting why and how Perl got to the state of being "disliked" today in programmer surveys. It's not about the "undecidability".
Perl was a great language design lab experiment. They gave people 20 ways to do any simple thing, and then Matz and Guido looked to see which ways became popular and designed great languages that allow only those ways and maybe 1-2 more that are highly frowned upon. I'm almost as glad Perl exists as I am that I never needed to learn it.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Perl is designed to make life easier for the guy who writes the code, not the one who reads it. The motto "there is more than one way to do it" is telling. It allows beginners to write code the way they are most familiar with and give experts a large toolbox to be most efficient in many situations. The trouble is that while the writer only needs to know a subset of the language, the reader has to know everything in o…
> The motto "there is more than one way to do it" is telling. The more telling is you omitting the other half of the motto. TIMTOWTDIBSCINABTE
That's an apt motto for perl. One doesn't even need to know what it means.
It's worse than that. You can't parse Perl without running arbitrary Perl code: https://www.perlmonks.org/?node_id=663504
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> The motto "there is more than one way to do it" is telling. The more telling is you omitting the other half of the motto. TIMTOWTDIBSCINABTE
> TIMTOWTDIBSCINABTE That's an apt motto for perl. One doesn't even need to know what it means.