Perl, the first postmodern computer language (1999)
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Re: Perl, the first postmodern computer language (1999)
#2The author misunderstood what postmodern is. It is not the next epoch after modernism.
Re: Perl, the first postmodern computer language (1999)
#3Reposting my old comment https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10774245 :
> People seem to have forgotten that when Perl evolved from being a better AWK to the paradigm example of the modern "scripting language", Larry Wall explicitly described this as a rejection of the Unix small-tools philosophy. http://www.linux-mag.com/id/322/ ("But Perl was actually much more countercultural than you might think. It was intended to subvert the Unix philosophy. More specifically, it was intended to subvert that part of Unix philosophy that said that every tool should do only one thing and do that one thing well.") http://www.wall.org/~larry/pm.html The fact that getting things done with a Perlesque scripting language is now seen as the height of purist Unix propriety only shows how far gone the original Unix ideal now is. But moving to the scripting-glue model doesn't really get rid of small tools that endeavour to do one thing well, it just reimplements them inside the scripting-language universe as functions/objects, though with a more expressive and less burdensome common language that makes it easier for them to stay small while being correct and effective. The more expressive their shared language, the smaller [the individual tools in] a set of tools can be.
>> Text just isn't a great medium for IPC.
> Yes, in retrospect Unix's determination to know about nothing but binary or plaintext blobs and streams looks like an adolescent rebellion against the (apparently - I haven't used them) clunky record structures of '60s operating systems.
[Extra text] added for clarification.
Re: Perl, the first postmodern computer language (1999)
#4The author misunderstood what postmodern is. It is not the next epoch after modernism.
Saying that to a lingüist it's... interesting.
On Perl, CPAN was and it's still amazing, and lots of stuff came from that. For example, Mojolicious for the web, BioPerl for bioinformatics and Rivescript to write silly chatbots, among others. Oh, and pkg_* under OpenBSD.
INB4 gen-z's rant on "PeRl It'S UnRead@ble", check the intro from "perldoc perlintro".
EDIT: Unless I'm sure the deleted link it's right, I'd avoid posting it.
Re: Perl, the first postmodern computer language (1999)
#5Perl rose to popularity because early web development was all about text processing (reading web forms and outputting HTML) and Perl made that easier (regex deluxe) than other choices on unix at the time. It became the lingua franca of web developers. Perl 5 made heavy use of symbols so it was visually noisy, and then Perl 6 came along and added even more magic meanings to other symbols, and that was a tipping point of perl’s decline. Readability of code is paramount. Code is for machines to execute and for humans to understand. Perl code became both modernist abstract art, and Baroque in its intricacies.
Re: Perl, the first postmodern computer language (1999)
#6The author misunderstood what postmodern is. It is not the next epoch after modernism.
Saying that to a lingüist it's... interesting. On Perl, CPAN was and it's still amazing, and lots of stuff came from that. For example, Mojolicious for the web, BioPerl for bioinformatics and Rivescript to write silly chatbots, among others. Oh, and pkg_* under OpenBSD. INB4 gen-z's rant on "PeRl It'S UnRead@ble", check the intro from "perldoc perlintro". EDIT: Unless I'm sure the deleted link it's right, I'd avoid p…
Please don't post links to pirated content.
Re: Perl, the first postmodern computer language (1999)
#7I looked up postmodernism.
>opposition to epistemic certainty and the stability of meaning
Yep, that's Perl.
Re: Perl, the first postmodern computer language (1999)
#8Perl rose to popularity because early web development was all about text processing (reading web forms and outputting HTML) and Perl made that easier (regex deluxe) than other choices on unix at the time. It became the lingua franca of web developers. Perl 5 made heavy use of symbols so it was visually noisy, and then Perl 6 came along and added even more magic meanings to other symbols, and that was a tipping point…
What? Perl it's far more than a regex machine looking like line noise. If you think that about Perl, you'll get mad with AWK.
To me Perl it's a better tool for anything better than shell scripting without needing to get dirty with C or Go.
Re: Perl, the first postmodern computer language (1999)
#9Reposting my old comment https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10774245 : > People seem to have forgotten that when Perl evolved from being a better AWK to the paradigm example of the modern "scripting language", Larry Wall explicitly described this as a rejection of the Unix small-tools philosophy. http://www.linux-mag.com/id/322/ ("But Perl was actually much more countercultural than you might think. It was intended…
Interesting take, but as someone who still works regularly with the shell, I'd say there is still a place for small core utils connected together with pipes/textual streams.
If we're talking parsing and chopping up text files, I can usually whip up something with awk/jq/cut/whatever in far less time than writing an equivalent Python script. There's a threshold where you prefer to switch to the scripting language for maintainability/testing, but the shell won't be going anywhere any time soon.
Re: Perl, the first postmodern computer language (1999)
#10Meta-modernism was a mistake