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Why Perl Didn't Win

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Re: Why Perl Didn't Win

#121

Post by esaym »

mst wrote: post #82
bane wrote: post #7

Maintenance. I say this as somebody who loves Perl, quirks and all (actually because of the quirks). It's actually a beautiful language to work in in the same way English is a beautiful language -- it's a beauty because it's a goddamn mess. But it's a rotten language to maintain. Sure, it's perfectly possible to write highly maintainable code (I have a few 30-40k line Perl projects that I can open up and get right to…

I don't want the popularity we once had. The same people who wrote unreadable, unmaintainable perl went on to do the same sort of damage in PHP, then python, then ruby/rails, and now node.js/go. They were never a net positive to the community, and I'm not sorry to see them causing problems for somebody else. (and before somebody says "but that doesn't happen in X" ... yes, it does, even python lets you write code tha…

I was thinking the same thing. Didn't say anything because I didn't want to be rude to the "lets cut and paste code from google searches" coders...

If someone really wants to use a language, there is no excuse for not reading a book for that language first.

Re: Why Perl Didn't Win

#122

Post by phaylon »

liotier wrote: post #103
davewood wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are a few things to consider when trying to pick a good/the best module for a problem. - ask in irc.perl.org. it is very likely to get pointers from very experienced people. - use metacpan.org and pay attention to the votes/likes it got. and read the reviews. - each and every CPAN module is automatically tested. look at the stats to weed out problematic modules. - check out the release frequency and when the la…

I agree, but naive new Perl users might benefit from some prominent showcasing of well-known good modules or maybe comparison charts between modules in the same functional niche... Maybe that is a subject better left to Perl bloggers rather than to the neutral CPAN, but first contact with Perl is sometimes an embarrassment of riches. Anyway, I love the CPAN - whatever I imagine myself wanting to do, five people have…

Well, MetaCPAN has a leaderboard of modules, but it could be a bit more prominent: https://metacpan.org/favorite/leaderboard

Re: Why Perl Didn't Win

#123

Post by esaym »

Articles like this make me sad. Perl is a mature, well supported language with a thriving community. It is not in maintenance mode, a new version has come out every year for the last 4 or five years, all with new features, many more planned. Plus the perl conference attendance has been up every year for the last few years. http://www.yapcna.org

You say I should use something more modern? Are not all languages based off of methodologies from 1950?

And which one of these modern languages do I choose? Rust, Go, Python, Ruby, Java, JavaScript, node.js, coffee, dart, swift, C#, F#, Scala...

Probably many more that I missed but my head already spins. If anyone says they know more than 2 of those languages, then they only know them poorly.

I get tired of some new language coming out every year, along with a new community of trolls to bash everything and tell me I need to drop everything I already know to learn their new mess.

I must say, none of these languages that are in the news impress me. Yet there are many perl modules that do impress me.

I enjoy perl and its community. I like that it is not coupled with any huge corporate sponsorship. It is the bazaar in "The Cathedral and the Bazaar" and that I like.

Re: Why Perl Didn't Win

#124

Post by Roboprog »

EdwardDiego wrote: post #53
Roboprog wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On the one hand, that's a pretty cool library. (with a function to emulate back-tick into an array) On the other hand, now I have to go to the Enterprise Committee with a Permission To Install Library Form to get it, since it's not part of the base language. It might well be worth it to use Google's jar, but it's a delaying nuisance.

> On the other hand, now I have to go to the Enterprise Committee with a Permission To Install Library Form to get it, since it's not part of the base language. It might well be worth it to use Google's jar, but it's a delaying nuisance. Argh, same straw-man again mate.

Dude, this ain't no straw man, this is my life! :-)

("only the names have been changed, to protect the guilty")

Not sayin' it's a universal problem, but it's a problem for me.

Re: Why Perl Didn't Win

#125

Post by Mithaldu »

ghshephard wrote: post #18

I was a Perl scripter (I never rose to the level of JAPH) from around 1998 to 2002, with my final accomplishment being a two-way HRIS synchronization system between our installation of peoplesoft and our LDAP server (Netscape LDAP server, awesome product). And then I met Python, and I never wrote another line of Perl, and have written some python code almost every week since then. There were two personal reasons why…

A consideration to you:

You spent 4 years of learning Perl, 4 years in which you likely also massively improved your skills as a programmer, regardless of the Perl angle. Then you went to Python, bringing in your programmer experience, probably started off with a good book and had a much happier time.

So, do challenge yourself and ponder how much of that come from having spent 4 years programming, and how much from actual differences in the languages?

Re: Why Perl Didn't Win

#126

Post by SilasX »

BugBrother wrote: post #116
Joeri wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sane defaults are a cornerstone of good language and framework design because for better or worse people don't read the manual before they start using something. If a compiler doesn't do the right thing by default (throwing errors on problems a new user is likely to cause), it's a bad compiler.

What sane defaults are will change over the years. Perl kept amazing backwards compatibility by adding extra statements to modify how it worked. So "use strict;", "use warnings;" and "use ;". Both new code -- using the best OO system of the scripting languages, extendable syntax, etc, etc -- will run at the same time as most of the old and crufty stuff from before testing took over after the Millennium.

Lines that can affect the global behavior of the program are a mixed blessing.

Re: Why Perl Didn't Win

#127

Post by BugBrother »

SilasX wrote: post #126
BugBrother wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What sane defaults are will change over the years. Perl kept amazing backwards compatibility by adding extra statements to modify how it worked. So "use strict;", "use warnings;" and "use ;". Both new code -- using the best OO system of the scripting languages, extendable syntax, etc, etc -- will run at the same time as most of the old and crufty stuff from before testing took over after the Millennium.

Lines that can affect the global behavior of the program are a mixed blessing.

It would have been bad, if the design had been stupid enough to not make declarations file/package based... :-)

Re: Why Perl Didn't Win

#128

Post by BugBrother »

seanmcdirmid wrote: post #12
BugBrother wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Account literally created a few minutes before posting. YALT -- yet another languagewar troll.

It's not the first time someone has called Perl a write-only language, I heard that joke first in 1996.

Old trolling is respected?

Something like religion then, were people hearing voices long ago got followers -- but today generally are locked up? :-)

Re: Why Perl Didn't Win

#129

Post by steveklabnik »

mst wrote: post #90
steveklabnik wrote: post #2

I have two programming tattoos: a Perl camel and a Ruby ruby. That basically tells the story of why Perl didn't win for me: As soon as I started learning Ruby, I thought, "Oh, a cleaned-up Perl" and never really wrote any Perl code again. I love Perl's personality, its quirkiness, and its massive amount of libraries. Perl was _massively_ influential on me as a young programmer. But I'm pretty sure that I won't be wri…

ruby is awesome until I want OO ... then I get about an hour in and find that I've got to write 5x as much boilerplate as I would under Moose/Moo, and there's no proper trait/role system, and then I get annoyed and go back to perl. If ruby had OO as good as Moose, I'd seriously consider switching. Sadly the projects to port Moose to ruby never seem to get finished.

Moose came out five or six years after I made the move, so I'm not super familiar. Can you expand on some of this? I very, very rarely need 'boilerplate' in Ruby...

Re: Why Perl Didn't Win

#130

Post by seanmcdirmid »

BugBrother wrote: post #128
seanmcdirmid wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not the first time someone has called Perl a write-only language, I heard that joke first in 1996.

Old trolling is respected? Something like religion then, were people hearing voices long ago got followers -- but today generally are locked up? :-)

Perl has always been the butt of write-only jokes within the PL community; just imagine Perl as Rodney Dangerfield complaining that it "gets no respect." APL is of course, the canonical write-only language, but it is completely honest and accepting about it.

I programmed in Perl for CGI in the mid 90s and didn't see anything wrong with it. It was weird, but I had programmed with much worse before then (Lotus Notes Script...whew), so I wasn't really bothered by it. That being said, I see no reason ever to write another line of Perl again.

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