For years Mr Wall attempted to justify Perl as the manifestation of 90's neohippie culture, as this mashup of weirdness that was cool because it didn't worry about being particularly consistent with itself. I think the worst of it is when he draws parallels with the Dave Matthews Band. Ugh. Nothing screams "I'm soooo dated" like fixating on short-lived youth trends. Perhaps he should've described Perl as "hip hop" but... hmmm...
Perl, the first postmodern computer language (1999)
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Re: Perl, the first postmodern computer language (1999)
#12Reposting 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…
Sounds like powershell.
Re: Perl, the first postmodern computer language (1999)
#13I looked up postmodernism. >opposition to epistemic certainty and the stability of meaning Yep, that's Perl.
But don't forget the anti-movement "Modern Perl".
> Minimalism describes movements in various forms of art and design, especially visual art and music, wherein artists intend to expose the essence or identity of a subject through eliminating all nonessential forms, features, or concepts. Minimalism is any design or style wherein the simplest and fewest elements are used to create the maximum effect. - wikipedia on Modernism
Re: Perl, the first postmodern computer language (1999)
#14The 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…
I'm more than two decades away from being gen-z, and I still agree with that sentiment. There might be that theoretical wise and disciplined Perl programmer writing well structured and readable code, but wherever I interfaced with people writing/maintaining Perl code, it was the most hastily thrown together crap that once was a small tool that "just worked" and then slowly grew completely out of hands over the years. You can have that in any language, but for some reason Perl always excelled at that discipline.
Re: Perl, the first postmodern computer language (1999)
#15Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
I think Orelly themselves put these for free back in the day in its own domain. I have to seek archive.org in order to be sure.
I tought that because most of the books are outdated (15 years on IT it's an epoch), albeit the sed/awk/perl/*sh and Sendmail books are still godly useful.
Re: Perl, the first postmodern computer language (1999)
#16Reposting 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…
Sounds like powershell.
Powershell takes heavy inspiration and some syntax from Perl.
Re: Perl, the first postmodern computer language (1999)
#17>Whatever the verb you choose, I've done it over the course of the years from C, sh, csh, grep, sed, awk, Fortran, COBOL, PL/I, BASIC-PLUS, SNOBOL, Lisp, Ada, C++, and Python. To name a few. To the extent that Perl rules rather than sucks, it's because the various features of these languages ruled rather than sucked.
"I have stolen ideas from every book I have ever read. My principle in researching a novel is 'Read like a butterfly, write like a bee', and if this story contains any honey, it is entirely because of the quality of the nectar I found in the work of better writers."
Philip Pullman
Re: Perl, the first postmodern computer language (1999)
#18A developer has a problem they cannot solve and so they decide to use perl.
The developer now has two problems.
Re: Perl, the first postmodern computer language (1999)
#19Re: Perl, the first postmodern computer language (1999)
#20Perl 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…
As someone who spent many years loving Perl, I counter that literally every programming language is obtuse and overloaded with meaningless symbols.
And I'd also credit Perl's rise to Lincoln Stein who wrote CGI.pm which was at the time the absolute state of the art for managing web applications with Apache and mod_cgi.