21–30 of 472 posts
Perl6/Raku killed Perl. Python 3 almost killed Python. It's normal. Once a community loses faith, it's hard to stop them from leaving.
> Python 3 almost killed Python. People were being crybabies; the critics were extremely vocal and few. Python 3 improved the language in every way and the tooling to upgrade remains unmatched.
Perl6/Raku killed Perl. Python 3 almost killed Python. It's normal. Once a community loses faith, it's hard to stop them from leaving.
In fairness, Perl died because it was just not a good language compared to others that popped up after its peak. Sometimes people just move to the better option.
Perl was (and still is) a very expressive and concise language for working with text and a unix-style system. It exists in the odd space between a shell language and a general purpose language. But, shell scripting has already become somewhat of an arcane skill. I think the article nailed that Perl was just too hard to learn for the value it provided to survive. Python is not nearly as, erm, expressive as perl for wo…
Python is a crappy shell scripting language because the syntax around pipe and subprocess is really clunky.
Perl managed to have decent data structures and also have decent syntax around subprocess calls.
But I feel like the Python invoke module gives me everything I need wrt subprocess calls. I basically write any nontrivial "shell script" these days as a Python invoke command.
In fairness, Perl died because it was just not a good language compared to others that popped up after its peak. Sometimes people just move to the better option.
Yeah I think I would have been considered part of the “in” crowd of Perl to some degree and it wasn’t the culture that drove me away and to Python. It was Django and the people involved with it.
Culture?
In fairness, Perl died because it was just not a good language compared to others that popped up after its peak. Sometimes people just move to the better option.
Perl was (and still is) a very expressive and concise language for working with text and a unix-style system. It exists in the odd space between a shell language and a general purpose language. But, shell scripting has already become somewhat of an arcane skill. I think the article nailed that Perl was just too hard to learn for the value it provided to survive. Python is not nearly as, erm, expressive as perl for wo…
GvR explicitly describes the motivation behind Python in similar terms (I can probably find a timestamp in that recent documentary for this). But the goal there was to be fully "general purpose" (and readable and pragmatic, more than artistic) while trying to capture what he saw as the good things about shell languages.
And it's changed quite a bit since then, and there are many things I would say with the benefit of hindsight were clear missteps.
We all joke about the hard problems of computer science, but it seems to me that the hard problems of programming language design, specifically (and perhaps software engineering more generally?) include having good taste and figuring out what to do about reverse compatibility.
> I think the article nailed that Perl was just too hard to learn for the value it provided to survive. Python is not nearly as, erm, expressive as perl for working in that space, but it is much easier to learn
The use cases have also changed over time. Quite a lot of developers ended up on Windows (although that pendulum is perhaps shifting again) where the rules and expectations of "shell" are very different. To say nothing of e.g. web development; long gone are the days of "cgi-bin" everywhere.
Perl's "decline" saved it from a fate worst than death: popularity and splitting into dozens of incompatible versions from added/removed features (like python). Instead Perl is just available everywhere in the same stable form. Scripts always can just use the system perl interpreter. And most of the time a script written in $currentyear can run just as well on a perl system interpreter from 2 decades ago (and vice ve…
By comparison, Python can barely go one version without both introducing new things and removing old things from the language, so anything written in Python is only safe for a a fragile, narrow window of versions, and anything written for it needs to keep being updated just to stay where it is.
Python interpreter: if you can tell "print" is being used as a keyword rather than a function call, in order to scold the programmer for doing that, you can equally just perform the function call.
In fairness, Perl died because it was just not a good language compared to others that popped up after its peak. Sometimes people just move to the better option.
Perl was (and still is) a very expressive and concise language for working with text and a unix-style system. It exists in the odd space between a shell language and a general purpose language. But, shell scripting has already become somewhat of an arcane skill. I think the article nailed that Perl was just too hard to learn for the value it provided to survive. Python is not nearly as, erm, expressive as perl for wo…
And that could be one of major reasons why it lost in popularity. It was and still is easy to write but hard to read.
In fairness, Perl died because it was just not a good language compared to others that popped up after its peak. Sometimes people just move to the better option.
There was so much complexity hidden behind "do what I mean". For example, scalar vs array context which was super subtle: my @var = @array # copy the array my $var = @array # return the count of elements in array
my($f) = `fortune`; # assigns first line of output to $f.
my $f = `fortune`; # assign all output to $f.
[^1]: "It's all about context" (2001): https://archive.ph/IB2kR (http://www.stonehenge.com/merlyn/UnixReview/col38.html)
In fairness, Perl died because it was just not a good language compared to others that popped up after its peak. Sometimes people just move to the better option.
Perl is not that good a language though for practical purposes. The same way, a breadboard contraption is not what you want to ship as your hardware product, but without it, and the mistakes made and addressed while tinkering with it, the sleek consumer-grade PCB won't be possible to design.
maybe its painful for guys to admit that languages could be a lot better designed, and when such langauges appeared, everyone flocked to them.