The Joy of Perl (1998)

One of the most insightful pieces from the article:

""" "I realized at that point that there was a huge ecological niche between the C language and Unix shells," says Wall.

...

"People are always looking for the interstices," says Wall. "They are always looking for the new ecological niches. And the speed with which you can move into those ecological niches is really important, because the first person into a niche is often the winner." """

I once did a lot of Perl too, and I agree that Perl has many design flaws, but I prefer it this way. The main reason is if the same array is contained inside two different data structures, I want this to be explicitly obvious in the syntax of the language.

For example:

    my $a = [10, 20, 30];
    my $b = { array => $a };
    my $c = { array => $a };
    $b->{array}[0] = 99;
    print $c->{array}[0];

To me, anything the syntax can do to make it clear that the above code prints "99" (and not "10") is a net win. I don't care how cluttered it looks or how much extra typing it requires. If a language hides this from me in the name of cleanliness, then it's creating a leaky abstraction that is going to cause bugs and other forms of suffering.

If you're in a language which has immutable arrays, then this doesn't matter. But Perl isn't that, so that's not really relevant here.

To me, languages that add reference types (like C++'s) or language features that allow passing things by reference just create an extra cognitive burden. I look at some code and wonder, "Is this going to have ripple effects in distant places?", and I have to work through some rule in my head such as, if it's an integer, then no, but if it's an array, then yes.

Contrast that with the Perl (or C) way. I look at some code and the syntax tells me. There's no mistaking what's going on. So less cognitive burden and less opportunity for error.

In that time period I remember it being very common to hear Python introduced in conversation as a perl alternative. That was how I first heard of it too.

Did Duke Nukem Forever change its name? Perl 6 has. It's called Raku now (https://raku.org using the #rakulang tag on social media). And it is very much alive and ready for production.

> I still write Perl to this day

I do too. I use it for solving data-analysis problems in a portable and long-stable way. To this day, I can still run Perl that I wrote a long time ago. That's a good investment. I can build data structures in Perl OO that are much more efficient in memory consumption than other interpreted languages.

Good code and bad code exist in every language -- anyone who has been in the business for a while knows this.

I would just add that the rejection of sigils and braces is also the rejection of other very useful and efficient tooling, such as bash and awk.