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Perl, the first postmodern computer language (1999)

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Re: Perl, the first postmodern computer language (1999)

#31

Post by snorkel »

daneel_w wrote: post #27
snorkel wrote: post #5

Perl 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…

> Readability of code is paramount. For almost all languages, Perl included, this onus is mainly on the programmer. You can churn out gritty spaghetti in almost any language. Perl code doesn't have to look like what Perl programmers put out in the 90s. It's an old misconception that people refuse to let go of.

True you can write readable Perl code, but developers tend to adopt the predominant style of the community of each language, and the community was showcasing more brevity and cleverness than clarity

Re: Perl, the first postmodern computer language (1999)

#32

Post by melling »

andi999 wrote: post #12
leoc wrote: post #3

Reposting 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.

Perl: 1988

Powershell: 2006

Re: Perl, the first postmodern computer language (1999)

#33

Post by TremendousJudge »

daneel_w wrote: post #27
snorkel wrote: post #5

Perl 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…

> Readability of code is paramount. For almost all languages, Perl included, this onus is mainly on the programmer. You can churn out gritty spaghetti in almost any language. Perl code doesn't have to look like what Perl programmers put out in the 90s. It's an old misconception that people refuse to let go of.

>You can churn out gritty spaghetti in almost any language

But some languages make this much easier than others

Re: Perl, the first postmodern computer language (1999)

#34

Post by MichaelMoser123 »

maybe perl code is a bit unreadable at times, but its documentation is very readable. Just look at:

https://perldoc.perl.org/perlfunc#Perl-Functions-by-Category

All the standard library ordered as links, by categories that actually make sense!

Also perl5 used to be very accessible, even the parser error message made actual sense. I think that a lot of care has been put into these details, and that this attention to details did have a role in the success of the language.

Re: Perl, the first postmodern computer language (1999)

#35

Post by forgotmypw17 »

I love Perl. I use almost none of its more esoteric features, and just write "classic procedural" code, mostly using command-line utilities instead of third-party modules for anything I don't want to write myself (mainly cryptography), and I am so fucking happy not having to deal with breaking changes in my language, a rare quality these days.

I used a machine with a 9-year-old distro on it for a few months, and all my scripts ran without issue, and I have high confidence that they will continue to run for years down the road without my having to adjust them for breaking changes in the language runtime, which is more than I can say for most other stacks I've used.

Furthermore, ALL the code examples I can google up will work without me having to check if they're for the right version of Perl, because it has near-perfect backwards compatibility going back all the way to 5.000 from 1994.

About the only other thing with a comparable level of stability has been HTML/JS/CSS, which gets a lot of new features all the time, but, for the most part, if I use only minimal features, remains usable for years without modification.

Re: Perl, the first postmodern computer language (1999)

#36

Post by twic »

leoc wrote: post #3

Reposting 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…

> Perl evolved from being a better AWK

awk has named parameters! Perl was a step backwards!

Re: Perl, the first postmodern computer language (1999)

#38

Post by ninkendo »

daneel_w wrote: post #27
snorkel wrote: post #5

Perl 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…

> Readability of code is paramount. For almost all languages, Perl included, this onus is mainly on the programmer. You can churn out gritty spaghetti in almost any language. Perl code doesn't have to look like what Perl programmers put out in the 90s. It's an old misconception that people refuse to let go of.

> You can churn out gritty spaghetti in almost any language.

I hate this argument because it doesn't allow for any variation in the intrinsic readability of languages, or the style those languages encourage. Yes, you can write shitty code in any languages, but some languages encourage it, while other languages discourage it. I would say that Perl encourages unreadableness more than any of its peer languages, and the corpus of actual code out there is much more likely to be terse, unreadable noise than what you're likely to find in most python or ruby projects.

Re: Perl, the first postmodern computer language (1999)

#40

Post by catchclose8919 »

...to this day, I still can't wrap my head on how PHP even got to exist in a world where Perl was already filling the web niche just fine.

Also, if they wouldn't have made it too-weird-for-math-and-physics people, Perl would've probably filled Python's niche too.

And with that kind of resources focused on it, Perl 6 could've actually turned up into a clean nice new language that would've unified us all by also supporting nice compile-to-wasm.

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