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What Killed Perl?
Perl's decline was cultural
91–100 of 472 posts
Re: Perl's decline was cultural
#92In 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 a great language, the way Scala and Haskell are great: as openly experimental languages, they tried interesting, unorthodox approaches, with varied success. "More than one way to do it" is Perl's motto, because of its audacious experimentation ethos, I'd say. 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 pro…
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Re: Perl's decline was cultural
#93Earlier quoted context omitted.
I was surprised by that, too, and assumed it was a decade-old article until I saw the date at the bottom. Both being mentioned before Python is wilder, as is the total exclusion of JavaScript.
JavaScript on the backend is a rare thing to see, even in "resume driven development" scenarios it's usually some sort of static build that gets pushed to S3 or whatever.
Node.js is the most popular web framework/technology in the StackOverflow developer survey. Express is more popular than FastAPI, Django, Flask and Rails in the same survey. Just... what are you talking about?
Re: Perl's decline was cultural
#94Earlier quoted context omitted.
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
What exactly is complex or "super subtle" about this? It's the textbook example from the 1st chapter in the tutorial or something?
It's just very non-obvious what the code does when you're skimming it.
Especially in a dynamic language like Perl, you wouldn't know that you're passing down an integer instead of a function until the code blows up in a completely unrelated function.
Re: Perl's decline was cultural
#95Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yeah the joke was, Perl is write-only.
Write-only perhaps, but with perl you only have to write it once and it'll run forever, anywhere . No breaking on updates, no containers, no special version of Perl just for $application, just the system perl. Because of this, in practice, the amount of system administration mantainence and care needed for perl programs is far, far less than other languages like python where you actually do have to go in and re-write…
There was really only one big forced rewrite, 2->3, and ironically Perl was killed by failure to do the same with 5->6.
I agree that python versioning and especially library packaging is the worst part of the language, though.
Re: Perl's decline was cultural
#96Re: Perl's decline was cultural
#97Earlier quoted context omitted.
Perl is a great language, the way Scala and Haskell are great: as openly experimental languages, they tried interesting, unorthodox approaches, with varied success. "More than one way to do it" is Perl's motto, because of its audacious experimentation ethos, I'd say. 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 pro…
> "More than one way to do it" is Perl's motto, because of its audacious experimentation ethos, I'd say. Perl lets every developer write Perl in their own idiosyncratic way. And every developer does. It makes for very un-fun times when I'm having to read a file that's been authored by ten developers over ten years, each of whom with varying opinions and skill levels. I guess in 2026, it'll be 11 developers writing it…
Something I only figured out in the ‘10s is that the main tax of code smells is during debugging. Debugging when taken to the level of art is less about sorting all of the possible causes for a problem by likelihood but by ease of validation.
Things that are cheap to check should be checked first unless they are really unlikely. You change the numbers game from trying to make the biggest cleaving lines possible, to smaller bites that can be done rapidly (and perhaps more importantly, mentally cheaply).
Code smells chum the waters. Because where there is smoke sometimes there is fire, and code smells often hide bugs. You get into Tony Hoare’s Turing award speech; either no bugs are obvious, or there are no obvious bugs.
So I end up making the change easy and then making the easy change because we have more code each week so the existing code needs to be simpler if someone is going to continue to understand the entire thing.
Perl doesn’t seem to have figured this out at all.
Re: Perl's decline was cultural
#98I looked at Perl once and decided to just not use it, and hoped it'd go away so I never have to use it. Sorry, the decline was probably due to it being bad.
Re: Perl's decline was cultural
#99Earlier quoted context omitted.
"Willing" is an interesting word choice. There was quite a bit of resistance in the Python world despite the clear benefits. (2.x really could not be fixed, because the semantics were fundamentally broken in many places.)
It's open source. Any one ( and I'm sure a few have tried) can fork 2.x and keep using it. 3.x is remarkably easy , you can probably onboard a non programer to Python in a month.
> Any one ( and I'm sure a few have tried) can fork 2.x and keep using it.
They have tried and succeeded: https://docs.activestate.com/activepython/2.7/
I still consider the result "broken".
Re: Perl's decline was cultural
#100There was a lot of pressure in the Perl community to write things as succinctly as possible instead of as maintainably and understandably. That’s not realistic for use in a field with a lot of turnover and job hopping.
There was no such pressure. That's ridiculous. There were a lot of things people could grab as reasons to form an opinion without even reading articles, never mind the tutorial. They then ended up with php or python, even java for crying out loud, and years later THAT was a problem.