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We were wizards – a foreword to Learning Perl (1993)

jwgoerlich.com

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Re: We were wizards – a foreword to Learning Perl (1993)

#21

Post by alfiedotwtf »

hnlmorg wrote: post #19
kstenerud wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bashing Perl is a meme precisely because of the mentality of the creators of Perl (who set the culture). This "Forward to Learning Perl" epitomizes the mentality: Imagery of wizards, alchemy, breaking all the stuffy rules that quashed creative thought, etc. He even says "bowing down at the Temple of Orthogonality" like orthogonality a bad thing! It hearkens back to the days when motor cars were curiosities that requi…

> Perl was rightly bashed because it was the poster child of cowboy coding, which flies in the face of good engineering practices: Understandability, predictability, reproducibility, measurability, safety. That’s the meme, but it’s simply not true. I’m going to use Python as a basis of comparison because that’s the language which, from my perspective at least, seemed to replace Perl. > understandability A lot has bee…

>> safety > >Perl basically invented unit tests amongst the scripting languages. It also has stricter run modes to differentiate between one time scripts and important business code.

Don't forget Tainted Mode! It's 2024 and I still have never seen it adopted in any other language. It's essentially SELinux-lite for variables :)

IMHO Perl lost to Python because of 3 reasons: 1) Google at the time chose Python and it was the new cool startup everyone wanted to work at, 2) Pandas and Numpy weren't matched in the market (I'd even argue this is still true in 2024), and 3) Perl 6 was way too ambitious and scared people off (even though Perl 5 was never going to go away overnight (and still hasn't))

Re: We were wizards – a foreword to Learning Perl (1993)

#22

Post by alexey-salmin »

kstenerud wrote: post #9
alfiedotwtf wrote: post #2

Bashing Perl is now a meme, but I can never get over what could have been… Python 3000 and Perl 6 had the community all abuzz. CPAN was the amazing Wild West where people were sharing amazing libraries in such a simple way compared to how every other language was still using the likes of Source Forge and possibly even Fresh Meat (GitHub didn’t exist yet). Don’t fall into the meme trap of hating on Perl. Although it’s…

Bashing Perl is a meme precisely because of the mentality of the creators of Perl (who set the culture). This "Forward to Learning Perl" epitomizes the mentality: Imagery of wizards, alchemy, breaking all the stuffy rules that quashed creative thought, etc. He even says "bowing down at the Temple of Orthogonality" like orthogonality a bad thing! It hearkens back to the days when motor cars were curiosities that requi…

People often forget how bad things were in 2000s. A "serious engineering discipline" usually meant Java and "writing a unit test and five lines of docstring for every get/set method". I'd go for wizards and alchemy any day.

Even today many of the "serious engineers" of the time still roam the industry and show up for interviews every now and then, completely unable to write code. Some even capture younger souls into this trap, a sad picture.

Re: We were wizards – a foreword to Learning Perl (1993)

#23

Post by retrobox »

Perl was one of the first languages I learned and also the first language I used commercially. I have a huge soft spot for it as a language. Still love Perl regular expressions like no other. I loved the camel book and its various footnotes with both humour and deeper knowledge on a topic.

Re: We were wizards – a foreword to Learning Perl (1993)

#24

Post by lloeki »

hnlmorg wrote: post #19
kstenerud wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bashing Perl is a meme precisely because of the mentality of the creators of Perl (who set the culture). This "Forward to Learning Perl" epitomizes the mentality: Imagery of wizards, alchemy, breaking all the stuffy rules that quashed creative thought, etc. He even says "bowing down at the Temple of Orthogonality" like orthogonality a bad thing! It hearkens back to the days when motor cars were curiosities that requi…

> Perl was rightly bashed because it was the poster child of cowboy coding, which flies in the face of good engineering practices: Understandability, predictability, reproducibility, measurability, safety. That’s the meme, but it’s simply not true. I’m going to use Python as a basis of comparison because that’s the language which, from my perspective at least, seemed to replace Perl. > understandability A lot has bee…

> safety

You forgot safe mode and tainting, which while imperfect and has some sharp edges, is a first class construct that when correctly wielded outright prevents classes of attacks like shell or SQL injections or XSS.

Some have been reinventing it in a piggybacked way, and so, partially/poorly (comparatively), e.g Rails's safe/unsafe strings in ActionView.

Re: We were wizards – a foreword to Learning Perl (1993)

#25

Post by singingfish »

hnlmorg wrote: post #19
kstenerud wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bashing Perl is a meme precisely because of the mentality of the creators of Perl (who set the culture). This "Forward to Learning Perl" epitomizes the mentality: Imagery of wizards, alchemy, breaking all the stuffy rules that quashed creative thought, etc. He even says "bowing down at the Temple of Orthogonality" like orthogonality a bad thing! It hearkens back to the days when motor cars were curiosities that requi…

> Perl was rightly bashed because it was the poster child of cowboy coding, which flies in the face of good engineering practices: Understandability, predictability, reproducibility, measurability, safety. That’s the meme, but it’s simply not true. I’m going to use Python as a basis of comparison because that’s the language which, from my perspective at least, seemed to replace Perl. > understandability A lot has bee…

Back compat is an important thing. A few years ago we took a 250kline from perl 5.8.9 to perl 5.16 in one hit. Out of the entire application under 50 lines of application code needed to be changed (excepting the big bump in cpan module versions). Currently I'm slowly finalising the move from 5.16 to whatever debian stable is currently shipping 5.34 maybe? The biggest pain point is some type safety in the elastic search cpan module. Other than that I've had to slightly refactor some hacky but effective cache invalidation startup code due to a weird `perl -e` bug I found but can't characterise sufficiently precisely to report. The only reason that the perl latest upgrade wasn't done incrementally was because of a super weird unicode bug between perl and the oracle client library which is now out of scope for us.

But I agree perl can have bad management problems because of different people's capabilities, and different people's approach to showing their individuality.

Re: We were wizards – a foreword to Learning Perl (1993)

#26

Post by gorgoiler »

larodi wrote: post #14

We were indeed, and sadly like many true wizards - we were grumpy and too smart and too weird for the world. And we had too many sigyls and weird symbols and we didn’t see farther than our nose, so we weren’t that good with foretelling things, but only with practical magic. Even though wizards foretold nPm by inventing CJAN - like Cpan for JavaScript. And also IO::Async and Lehman’s work was very much ahead of NodeJS…

POE (2001!) was another async-ahead-of-its-time:

https://www.perl.com/pub/2001/01/poe.html/

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perl_Object_Environment

Re: We were wizards – a foreword to Learning Perl (1993)

#27

Post by pjmlp »

Yeah, while everyone still discussing on how to do FP in mainstream languages, Higher-Order Perl was published in 2005, placing many of such ideas how we were already doing that stuff in Perl into paper.

Perl allows to come at peace with UNIX being done in C, by exposing similar programing language capabilities, mixed with Lisp like wizardy, without having to deal with C security faults unless required for performance reasons, that could not be improved in any other way.

Re: We were wizards – a foreword to Learning Perl (1993)

#28

Post by arp242 »

eperoumal wrote: post #17
bane wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Perl has a weird way of letting you go from thought to code, and disappearing in between, unlike any other language I've ever used. You really can go from idea to functioning system as fast as you type without a lot of pre-planning. It's hard to describe, and the style has fallen out of fashion for more formal, easier to share between humans languages like Java or python, which feel like they introduce an inherent fr…

I so much feel the same. At the time I was writing Perl, each line made so much sense, as if I was speaking my mother tongue. It was clearly an extension of my brain. Never had that feeling with any other programming language, and it took me years to eventually let Perl go and try to wrap my head around Python.

I wonder how much Larry Wall's background as a linguist has to do with that, which perhaps also explain some of Perl's "messier" features, just like natural language is kind of messy.

I once had a long conversation about this with a linguist and Perl programmer that I randomly met in a pub. However, I was quite drunk and don't really recall too much, and we never saw each other again.

Re: We were wizards – a foreword to Learning Perl (1993)

#30

Post by BrandoElFollito »

andrewl-hn wrote: post #8

About 5-6 years ago I found a new niche for Perl in my day-to-day work. I did a lot of shell scripting at the time and was constantly getting annoyed by subtle differences between macOS and Linux. Sed is especially difficult, because the flags in BSD version and GNU version for in-place search and replace do not match. Plus, sed regexes are more primitive compared to most other languages. I decided to switch from sed…

> Eventually I started expanding my Perl use to a few lines of code at the time, and now I write a few larger (100+ LOC) scripts in it a year.

This was the same road I took in the late 90's - started with simple scripts and ended up with more and more complex scripts when I was learning all the shortcuts. Until the day I could not understand anymore my own code from a few days back :)

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