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Perl's decline was cultural

beatworm.co.uk

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Re: Perl's decline was cultural

#101

Post by morshu9001 »

nine_k wrote: post #29
mmastrac wrote: post #4

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 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…

Couldn't they have figured out one decent way to do things before releasing features to all users? I tried Scala for a bit then decided it was complicated for no good reason.

Idk about Haskell, but I used Erlang which is also purely functional. No matter how long I used it and tried to appreciate its elegance, it became clear this isn't a convenient way to do things generally. But it was designed well, unlike Scala.

Re: Perl's decline was cultural

#102

Post by raverbashing »

MangoToupe wrote: post #15
deafpolygon wrote: post #5

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.

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

Re: Perl's decline was cultural

#103

Post by edoceo »

tmp10423288442 wrote: post #70
simonw wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This made me smile given Python's love of Monty Python references - the cheese shop etc.

I appreciated them at the time I encountered them (mid-2000s), but they were definitely a bit cringe in their frequency and shamelessness. I wonder if younger people even know Monty Python anymore - by my time, I think people had mostly forgotten about Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, even if 42 survived.

The kids these days have factored 42 to 6,7 (said with some inflection and hand waving)

Re: Perl's decline was cultural

#104

Post by d_sem »

I worked for a few years in an large org which utilized perl for build scripts, testing automation, and a few other things. I would summarize the half decade Perl learning curve as initial bewilderment, intermediate cult like praise, to advance level disillusionment.

There was something about scaling usage in large teams that felt awkward and high friction.

Re: Perl's decline was cultural

#105

Post by oncallthrow »

> Perl always had a significant amount of what you might call "BOFH" culture, which came from its old UNIX sysadmin roots. All of those passive aggressive idioms and in jokes like "RTFM", "lusers", "wizards", "asking for help the wrong way" etc.

> [...]

> Cultural conservatism as a first principle.

Counterpoint to this: Rust. Rust has a similar RTFM/"wizards" culture, but is not culturally conservative (in any sense of the word).

My two cents: Perl's "culture" had little to do with its fall. I think Perl's problems run much deeper. Perl is built on rotten foundations. It's fundamentally a scripting language (albeit with bolted on additions to make it kinda-OOP), and it therefore has all the problems that scripting languages have for building large software projects.

Those problems have no quick fix, and indeed fixing them would require throwing the language out entirely -- at which point, why not simply switch to another language entirely (which is exactly what happened...).

Re: Perl's decline was cultural

#106

Post by nine_k »

pavel_lishin wrote: post #72
nine_k wrote: post #29

Earlier 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…

Exactly. Perl is about experimenting, trying things your way, and discovering new and good ways to write programs. Which is a wonderful capability for research and discovery, and for art or recreation, but not that great for industrial production.

This is why Perl was quite fit for the job at the dawn, or, rather, the detonation phase of the Internet explosion in late 1980s and early 1990s, along with Lisp and Smalltalk that promote similar DIY wizardry values. But once the industry actually appeared and started to mature, more teamwork-friendly languages like Java, PHP, and Python started to take over.

Re: Perl's decline was cultural

#107

Post by eduction »

nine_k wrote: post #29
mmastrac wrote: post #4

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 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…

Not really. It wasn’t audacious in service of anything innovative. Haskell takes functional programming to the nth degree, scala tried to be an advanced Java for example better at concurrency.

Perl was an early dynamic (garbage collected) “scripting language” but no more advanced than its contemporary python in this regard.

It had the weird sigils due to a poor design choice.

It had the many global cryptic variables and implicit variables due to a poor design choice.

It has the weird use of explicit references because of the bad design choice to flatten lists within lists to one giant list.

It actually was the one thing you said it wasn’t - a good practical general language at least within web and sysadmin worlds. At least until better competitors came along and built up library ecosystems.

Re: Perl's decline was cultural

#108

Post by creer »

daedrdev wrote: post #6

I think a big part is does someone starting to program even hear that Perl exists? No, and they start learning python and so have little need to learn Perl after that

Which is (sadly) hilarious because that was the reason most people seem to have gone with python: they were told "this is what we use here" or they bought the "line noise" nonsense. They never put much effort into this.

But I also think that people who are truly interested in programming immediately learn that there are many different paradigms. And the net makes it dead easy for them to explore different directions and, I don't know, fall in love with haskell or something. Perl is plenty visible enough for THAT. I don't know about perl 6 / raku though.

Re: Perl's decline was cultural

#110

Post by totallykvothe »

atherton94027 wrote: post #17
mmastrac wrote: post #4

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

That's not super subtle any more than it's super subtle that "*" performs multiplication and "+" performs addition. Sometimes you just need to learn the language.

This is not a general defense of Perl, which is many times absolutely unreadable, but this example is perfectly comprehensible if you actually are trying to write Perl and not superimpose some other language on it.*

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