Perl and Undecidability (2008)
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Perl and Undecidability (2008)
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Re: Perl and Undecidability (2008)
#2You know there was that recent Stackoverflow analysis that concluded that Perl was the most disliked programming language?
It got me to thinking about how Perl managed to become quite so profoundly disliked, and I remembered these papers and thought that maybe things like this are the reason.
Re: Perl and Undecidability (2008)
#3You know there was that recent Stackoverflow analysis that concluded that Perl was the most disliked programming language? It got me to thinking about how Perl managed to become quite so profoundly disliked, and I remembered these papers and thought that maybe things like this are the reason.
Perl is disliked because it has a very shallow learning curve to do badly, and a high learning curve to do well. Therefore, lots of people see a lot of bad code, but also people don’t understand a lot of good code.
Re: Perl and Undecidability (2008)
#4You know there was that recent Stackoverflow analysis that concluded that Perl was the most disliked programming language? It got me to thinking about how Perl managed to become quite so profoundly disliked, and I remembered these papers and thought that maybe things like this are the reason.
People don't really care about how hard it is to parse a language, and complex grammers might actually be due to making it easier for humans. One of the bigger differences is IDE support, but more regular languages that compete with Perl had about the same issue here...
Perl derives its dislike from about the same source as BASIC (and arguably PHP): Early errors/preconceptions and plenty of non-programmers writing code (home computer users, sysadmins). Perl4 was used for some pretty hacky jobs, replacing sed/awk/shell combinations (which were horribly fragmented across the unices of that time). Modular Perl5 code had little to do with that, but by then the damage was done. Early CGI scripts didn't exactly help, either.
Modern Perl is a step further than that, but when Moose and the like became popular, people already moved away to PHP or Ruby, both being part of the same family.
Re: Perl and Undecidability (2008)
#5For the people out there that's not so into CS, and does not understands it's implications. It basically means you could write a perl program that could cause an infinite loop in the interpreter (or compiler). This I would presume independant of the actual implementation of the compiler and intrepreter as that would only mean this is a bug report for the specific implementation, and not a problem with the language design.
Re: Perl and Undecidability (2008)
#6You know there was that recent Stackoverflow analysis that concluded that Perl was the most disliked programming language? It got me to thinking about how Perl managed to become quite so profoundly disliked, and I remembered these papers and thought that maybe things like this are the reason.
Perl is a very practical language. But this practicality has been achieved by building features on top of bad design. The result is a big, complex and quirky language. To make this worse, the community decided to "fix" this re designing the whole language from scratch. They created Perl 6 which has a much better design, but it's incompatible. The community now it's broken in two and the future doesn't look that good.
Re: Perl and Undecidability (2008)
#7You know there was that recent Stackoverflow analysis that concluded that Perl was the most disliked programming language? It got me to thinking about how Perl managed to become quite so profoundly disliked, and I remembered these papers and thought that maybe things like this are the reason.
Perl is disliked because it has a very shallow learning curve to do badly, and a high learning curve to do well. Therefore, lots of people see a lot of bad code, but also people don’t understand a lot of good code.
Its the main reason any language is hated. JavaScript now is less hated because the tooling got there and people were educated at university to program in it well. PHP and Ruby are on the list of disliked on the SO analysis. Which is basically nonsense for modern versions of both languages. I really wish these stats would state "Perl 5" too, as Perl 6 is really modern in semantics and syntax and is nice to code in.
Re: Perl and Undecidability (2008)
#8You know there was that recent Stackoverflow analysis that concluded that Perl was the most disliked programming language? It got me to thinking about how Perl managed to become quite so profoundly disliked, and I remembered these papers and thought that maybe things like this are the reason.
>how Perl managed to become quite so profoundly disliked
I'm guessing the reasons are actually more conspicuous than computer science concepts of "undecidability" since most working programmers don't read academic papers to judge whether they like/disklike a programming language.
The conspicuous reasons seem to be a combination of:
1) PERL's usage of sigils.[1] One the one hand, it makes code compact and terse. On the other hand, many perceive the source code as "line noise" or "sigil hell". This is the opposite problem of other disliked languages like Objective-C where people complain it's too verbose.
2) PERL not having a constantly updated ecosystem that keeps up with new trends in computing. PERL was great for text munging (alternative to sed & awk). However, PERL wasn't extended as the driving language for dynamic web pages (Brendan Eich created Javascript instead of embedding Perl interpreter in Netscape browser), or GUI data entry forms programming (Java and C# gained popularity), or machine learning (Google developers designed Python to be 1st class in Tensorflow), etc.
tldr: PERL is perceived as "legacy" with ugly syntax
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sigil_(computer_programming)
Re: Perl and Undecidability (2008)
#9You know there was that recent Stackoverflow analysis that concluded that Perl was the most disliked programming language? It got me to thinking about how Perl managed to become quite so profoundly disliked, and I remembered these papers and thought that maybe things like this are the reason.
It's actually quite interesting, from what I've understood it's one of few well adopted programming languages that's designed by a linguist and made primarily to be easily understood and written by humans.
At the time of inception and around the peak of popularity I do believe it was a quite innovative language. But by now we have a much larger set of languages aimed for the same target group, many of which have gained larger adoption among developers of this time.
In a way I can almost see Node as "the new Perl" in the sense that it's a widely used language across platforms praised for it's large set of available libraries and ease of creating "quick n' dirty"-hacks.
Re: Perl and Undecidability (2008)
#10It's worse than that. You can't parse Perl without running arbitrary Perl code: