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Perl's decline was cultural

beatworm.co.uk

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Re: Perl's decline was cultural

#451

Post by zahlman »

tbrownaw wrote: post #109

The reason I mostly use Python is `python3 -mvenv env`. If I know that everything I might want is part of Perl's built-in modules, I prefer Perl.

Psst: even if you aren't using uv, you can use a global pip with `--python` and create your venvs `--without-pip` to save time (unless you have many invocations per venv, since `--python` works through a not-very-sane hack and is a bit slower as a result). And you can use Pipx to provision that global pip, and then you also have Pipx available. https://zahlman.github.io/posts/2025/01/07/python-packaging-...

Re: Perl's decline was cultural

#452

Post by zahlman »

xscott wrote: post #77
jordanb wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It was annoying but if it hadn't happened Python would still be struggling with basic things like Unicode. Organizations struggled with it but they struggle with basically every breaking change. I was on the tooling team that helped an organization handle the transition of about 5 million lines of data science code from python 2.7 to 3.2. We also had to handle other breaking changes like airflow upgrades, spark 2->3,…

> It was annoying but if it hadn't happened Python would still be struggling with basic things like Unicode. They should've just used Python 2's strings as UTF-8. No need to break every existing program, just deprecate and discourage the old Python Unicode type. The new Unicode type (Python 3's string) is a complicated mess, and anyone who thinks it is simple and clean isn't aware of what's going on under the hood. H…

What you propose would have, among other things, broken the well established expectation of random access for strings, including for slicing, while leaving behind unclear semantics about what encoding was used. (If you read in data in a different encoding and aren't forced to do something about it before passing it to a system that expects UTF-8, that's a recipe for disaster.) It would also leave unclear semantics for cases where the underlying bytes aren't valid UTF-8 data (do you just fail on every operation? Fail on the ones that happen to encounter the invalid bytes?), which in turn is also problematic for command-line arguments.

Re: Perl's decline was cultural

#453

Post by zahlman »

JoshTriplett wrote: post #80
jordanb wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It was annoying but if it hadn't happened Python would still be struggling with basic things like Unicode. Organizations struggled with it but they struggle with basically every breaking change. I was on the tooling team that helped an organization handle the transition of about 5 million lines of data science code from python 2.7 to 3.2. We also had to handle other breaking changes like airflow upgrades, spark 2->3,…

With the benefit of hindsight, though, Python 3 could have been done as a non-breaking upgrade. Imagine if the same interpreter supported both Python 3 and Python 2. Python 3 code could import a Python 2 module, or vice versa. Codebases could migrate somewhat more incrementally. Python 2 code's idea of a "string" would be bytes, and python 3's idea of a "string" would be unicode, but both can speak the other's langua…

Why would I ever risk inflicting a stack trace like

  Traceback (most recent call last):
    File "x.py", line 2, in 
      foo.encode()
  UnicodeDecodeError: 'ascii' codec can't decode byte 0xff in position 0: ordinal not in range(128)
on a user of Python 3.x where it isn't possible? (Note the UnicodeDecodeError coming from an attempt to encode.)

Re: Perl's decline was cultural

#454

Post by zahlman »

raverbashing wrote: post #102
MangoToupe wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

The real problem here was releasing 3.0 as if it was stable, when the real usable version was 3.3/3.4

I recall 3.2 being okay. But it was definitely better by 3.4.

Re: Perl's decline was cultural

#455

Post by array_key_first »

zahlman wrote: post #450
array_key_first wrote: post #413

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Why is there no outreach to other minorities in tech, like the Amish, for example? They are certainly more underrepresented than women in the python community. Well the amish wouldn't want the outreach, because they're amish. > There are plenty of other outlets more suitable for doing our civic duty. I kind of hate this mentality, because there's no logic or reasonableness behind it. There's ALWAYS another place yo…

> There's ALWAYS another place you can do something. Always. Where you draw the line is arbitrary. Yes, that's the point. If you're drawing a line that agentively impacts others, you are the one responsible for defending where it's drawn. > There's no rulebook anywhere saying we can't do this in tech. Nobody is telling you that you can't do these things (except where impermissible by law). They are telling you not to…

I think where we disagree is the "roping people in" thing.

If you're part of an organization, you're gonna be roped into their organization standards. Whether that be for behavior (no cursing on their forums), or for outreach, or whatever.

Joining the organization is optional, and if you feel, say, the python foundation doesn't align with your own beliefs, then just don't join. That's always been allowed.

As for working with people you might not want to, that's also just a part of organizations.

Re: Perl's decline was cultural

#456

Post by darepublic »

jordanb wrote: post #8

I always found the Perl "community" to be really off-putting with all the monk and wizard nonsense. Then there was the whole one-liner thing that was all about being clever and obscure. Everything about Python came off as being much more serious and normal for a young nerd who wasn't a theater kid.

In community college our perl professor was often late. One time he just didn't show up. I remember him once saying something like job security involved writing indecipherable code so none of your coworkers could understand it. There was a tinge of bitterness in his remark. Our exams were essentially obscure perl puzzles where we had to read the code and determine the output, some kind of coded phrase.

Re: Perl's decline was cultural

#457

Post by chromatic »

colinstrickland wrote: post #443
chromatic wrote: post #430

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Excellent point in the last paragraph. Python, JavaScript, Rust, Swift, and C# all have/had business models and business advocates in a way that Perl never did.

Do you not think O'Reilly Associates fits some of that role? It seemed like Perl had more commercial backing compared to the other scripting languages if anything at that point. Python and JavaScript were picked up by Google, but later. Amazon was originally built out of Perl. Perl never converted its industry footprint into that kind of advocacy, I think some of that is also culture-driven.

Maybe until the 2001 O'Reilly layoffs. Tim hired Larry for about 5 years, but that was mostly working on the third edition of the Camel. A handful of other Perl luminaries worked there at the same time (Jon Orwant, Nat Torkington).

When I joined in 2002, there were only a couple of developers in general, and no one sponsored to work on or evangelize any specific technology full time. Sometimes I wonder if Sun had more paid people working on Tcl.

I don't mean to malign or sideline the work anyone at ORA or ActiveState did in those days. Certainly the latter did more work to make Perl a first-class language on Windows than anyone. Yet that's very different from a funded Python Software Foundation or Sun supporting Java or the entire web browser industry funding JavaScript or....

Re: Perl's decline was cultural

#458

Post by calmbonsai »

altairprime wrote: post #143
calmbonsai wrote: post #16

No. Perl died because other languages starting having an equivalent to CPAN and its extremely flexible syntax does not scale for medium to large team coordination.

It does if you restrict flexibility, but one of the critical flaws in Perl culture was the belief in letting everyone evolve in different directions while cooperating. It’s a genuinely charming belief, but it’s also explicitly incompatible with ‘interchangeable parts’ employment, and tends to only work in an environment where every individual is the ‘wizard’ lord of their personal domain over code. Even if you manage…

One can say the same for C++.

Yup. An explicit 'sane' subset of C++ can trivially linted and enforced. Sadly, the same can not be said for Perl.

Re: Perl's decline was cultural

#459

Post by nucleogenesis »

colinstrickland wrote: post #328
nucleogenesis wrote: post #138

The number of blogs posted on here by people who can’t be arsed to make their writing legible on mobile blows my mind. Did everybody just skip the section of their CSS journey that covered media queries or what? I enjoyed the article but it was a nightmare to read on my phone’s browser

(Author) Sorry you had a poor experience, yes my blog "engine" is a hacked together POS that barely works, with hand written CSS, that was mostly built before the mobile first era, I have just tweaked it to work somewhat on portrait phone screens, but it's really not a very good website. I do try to generate fairly plain semantic HTML so the pages should work pretty well with "reader mode" or user stylesheets if you…

I definitely should have just opened it in reader mode in Safari but I just told myself I’d just not lose my spot again several times like a dope

Re: Perl's decline was cultural

#460

Post by boisterousness »

syncsynchalt wrote: post #216
creer wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Code golfing originated in perl. There was strong cultural pressure to be able to write perl in as few bytes as possible, ideally as a CLI one-liner. Books[1] were written on the topic. https://www.thriftbooks.com/w/perl-one-liners-130-programs-t...

Code golfing originated in APL.
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