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Perl's decline was cultural

beatworm.co.uk

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Re: Perl's decline was cultural

#121

Post by c0brac0bra »

Insanity wrote: post #83
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.

I don’t know about the wider Perl community, but I listened to some interviews from Larry Wall and he just came across as a nerdy guy having fun with what he’s doing. I quite liked listening to him.

My anecdotal experience was with perl guys who were ex-military, irreverent, and fly-by-the-seat-of-your-pants. The Java and .NET guys were straight laced and nerdy.

Re: Perl's decline was cultural

#122

Post by PunchyHamster »

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.

Perl made a mistake, the language was invested in depth of expression and that, in a programming language, just leads to a 1000 ways to write same thing where like... 2 of them are actually nice to read.

Pyton was ("was" was used here on purpose) the opposite, the whole "one way to do a thing" and insisting on more clean code even if more verbose.

You could write nice looking Perl code but you had to choose to do it, while Python pushed you in that direction from the start.

As much as I dislike using whitespace as flow control it also does make sure the code is always indented reasonably even if it is a newbie just starting in the language.

It didn't help that Perl, just like other languages after (PHP, JS, Python too), had a "curse of the newbie language", with many people starting with it (as at the time it was kinda only sensible choice for webpages before mod_php did a revolution in how most webpages are hosted), with no training and just winging it, which in language that puts no limits on what user can do and no guidance on what they should do... leads to that ugly one liners and line noise as a code scripts.

Re: Perl's decline was cultural

#123

Post by twoodfin »

oncallthrow wrote: post #105

> 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…

Probably stretching the cultural metaphor too far here, but Rust has much more of a “vanguard of the proletariat” vibe & appears susceptible to some of the problems inherent in that political mission.

Re: Perl's decline was cultural

#124

Post by anarticle »

Perl was of a time, so it's important to remember when it was around. CPAN was legitimately one of the first package managers for a programming language that WORKED. Contextually, its references are bash, sed, awk, and other cli tools. There are too many ways to do things in perl because of the various flavors / takes on how to do things. It was also a fun way to write cgi apps in the era of C/C++. Is that the best way to do things today? No! It was one way to do something complex in few lines of code. It was the python of its day in many ways.

There are tons of quirks that are interesting that influenced language development today, for me the spaceship operator "" was a fun one. You can have a flip through the camel book to see what kind of stunts were common in its era.

It is an auteur language that was not really done the way languages are today.

Perl 6 did massive damage to the community mainly because it was so different that it looked like a fantasy language. That along with Parrot really lost the plot for me, I had mostly stopped doing that kind of work and moved on to R for my bioinformatics things. Bioconductor was the bees knees.

I'm surprised at all the haterade, probably you're either This was also from a time when people still paid for compilers(!)

I am deeply biased, as I wrote a 3d distance calculator in Perl for small molecule drugs. We were looking for disulfiram analogs doing biopanning and then simulations. There was a great PDB library for structures at that time that saved me tons of time. This was circa 2005~, ages from now.

Re: Perl's decline was cultural

#125

Post by ipaddr »

creer wrote: post #115
Scarblac wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It could have used a good "Perl: the Good Parts" book. With a team where everybody wrote it in a similar style, Perl did perfectly well. Mod_perl was fast. I liked Perl. Then Django came out, and then Numpy, and Perl lost. But Python is still so incredibly slow....

Mostly - from here - python is so incredibly slow to write. Who has this kind of time?

Slow to write, slow to run and throws whitespace errors. Surprised it made it so far.

Re: Perl's decline was cultural

#126

Post by phil21 »

pavel_lishin wrote: post #68
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.

I'm having to pick up some perl now, and while I don't interact with the community, it surely _feels_ like it was written by wizards, for wizards. Obscure, non-intuitive oneliners, syntax that feels like it was intentionally written to be complicated, and a few other things that feel impossible to understand without reading the docs. (Before everyone jumps on me - yes, as a developer, I should be able to read documen…

It’s interesting to me how brains work.

Perl has always “flowed” for me and made mostly intuitive sense. Every other language I’ve had to hack on to get something done is a struggle for me to fit into some rigid-feeling mental box.

I understand I’m the weird one, but man I miss Perl being an acceptable language to pound out a quick program in between “bash script” and “real developer”.

Re: Perl's decline was cultural

#127

Post by riffraff »

Insanity wrote: post #83
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.

I don’t know about the wider Perl community, but I listened to some interviews from Larry Wall and he just came across as a nerdy guy having fun with what he’s doing. I quite liked listening to him.

I was never a perl programmer, but this was my impression of basically every perl programmer I have interacted with.

Also, I think Larry Wall's "Diligence, Patience, Humility"[0] is among my favourite articles about programming.

[0] https://www.oreilly.com/openbook/opensources/book/larry.html

Re: Perl's decline was cultural

#128

Post by chrisweekly »

superkuh wrote: post #37
chrisweekly wrote: post #13

Earlier 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…

Agreed! My father (RIP) absolutely loved Perl and could do amazing things with it in seemingly impossibly-few characters. I got reasonably proficient w/ regex but never came close to his wizardry. Much respect for those in his rarified company.

Re: Perl's decline was cultural

#129

Post by weare138 »

atherton94027 wrote: post #94
creer wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Then use one of the type systems for Perl.

https://metacpan.org/pod/Type::Tiny

Re: Perl's decline was cultural

#130

Post by twoodfin »

Emen15 wrote: post #74

Perl 5's non-breaking conservatism kept old scripts running forever, but it also meant there was never a clear migration path the way Python 3 eventually provided, and that made long term planning a lot harder.

Perl did have `use strict`, so there was at least some plausible path to making non-breaking changes under a new pragma.

The OP’s theory that Perl 6’s radicalism allowed Perl 5 to be conservative sounds right to me.

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