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Perl's decline was cultural

beatworm.co.uk

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Re: Perl's decline was cultural

#151

Post by MangoToupe »

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…

> With the benefit of hindsight, though, Python 3 could have been done as a non-breaking upgrade.

Not without enormous and unnecessary pain.

Re: Perl's decline was cultural

#152

Post by dehrmann »

eduction wrote: post #20
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.

I agree and Steve Yegge covered the reasons well here: https://sites.google.com/site/steveyegge2/ancient-languages-... His point about references is no small thing. Other dynamic languages don’t make users think much about the distinction between references and values at the syntax level. With Perl you needed to use “->” arrow operator frequently if and only if you were using references. So getting at a map inside an…

> bolted on, awkward params passing

Shell had to do this because of shell reasons, like how you need spaces where you shouldn't. Perl post-dated C by over a decade, so there was no reason for goofy argument unpacking.

Re: Perl's decline was cultural

#153

Post by lo_zamoyski »

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…

The term "surrogate activity" comes to mind, specifically, activities of no real value that some people like to waste time on to feel better about themselves.

Re: Perl's decline was cultural

#154

Post by altairprime »

creer wrote: post #140
Supermancho wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There was no such pressure. That's ridiculous. I lived it. I'm sure there's still some Mailing List archives and IRC snippets that still endure, demonstrating the utter vicious 1-upmanship of how to do something in Perl as succinctly as possible. Why do X and Y when you can just do Z? What are you really trying to do? etc.

You COULD, if you wanted, and spent quite a bit of effort in the pursuit of that hobby, participate in one-liner, or obfuscation, or golfing friendly contests. Which were enabled by perl's expressiveness constructs. Nobody pushed anyone into that. On the contrary "there is more than one way to do it" was there to legitimize that getting the problem solved was the goal - instead of trying to force a one true way (like…

Those experts were horrendously vicious. I can name them and can still describe their dismissive cruelty, since I spent ten years socializing nonstop in the Perl5 core communities (and have a CPAN id, and have an Authors entry in Perl5 core). Think “Linus before he learned to stop insulting people’s worth and focus on critiquing their work instead”. It was absolutely intended as a form of cultural propagation: I can do this more succinctly, so You Should Be Ashamed Before Me. If somehow you weren’t exposed to that aspect of it, I envy you.

Interestingly, that same prideful “my way is so obviously better that it’s a ridiculous waste of my time considering yours” ended up carrying forward to Mozilla, which was launched in part by cultural exports of the Perl5 conservative-libertarian community, and for a decade developer hiring was filtered for cultural sameness, leaving a forest of TMTOWTDI trees that viewed meadows as an aberration to be reforested back to their sameness.

Re: Perl's decline was cultural

#155

Post by MangoToupe »

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…

I can't say i've ever thought "wow I wish I had to use go's unicode approach". The bytes/str split is the cleanest approach of any runtime I've seen.

Re: Perl's decline was cultural

#156

Post by tasty_freeze »

Scarblac wrote: post #111
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…

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....

Check out "Perl Best Practices" by Damien Conway, and the more recent "Modern Perl" by Chromatic. Both can be had as paperbacks, and I think both are also available free on online.

Re: Perl's decline was cultural

#157

Post by harpiaharpyja »

tasty_freeze wrote: post #145
pavel_lishin wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 isn't bad language design that you need to study the language before you can use it. I look at haskell programs and it looks mysterious to me because I haven't spent any time studying it, but I'd not thing to say it is bad language design. Yes, one can write obscure perl code and some love perl golfing. In the same way there is an IOCCC which delights in unreadable code, it doesn't mean that the C language should…

Seems like the essential criteria is not whether you can write opaque code in it, but rather whether the language enables you to accomplish most tasks using clear, readable code. They aren't mutually exclusive.

Hopefully I am paraphrasing you correctly.

Re: Perl's decline was cultural

#158

Post by lo_zamoyski »

lysace wrote: post #46
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 is a sysadmin language. There's "always" been this tension between sysadmins and developers. In my mind (developer back then) I'd amateur-psychoanalyze all of that nonsense as some kind of inferiority complex meant to preserve the self image. Needless complexity can be a feature! And now we are all developers!

> some kind of inferiority complex meant to preserve the self image

Or, as the kids say, a flex, but without the sexy connotations.

(Incidentally, I am also reminded of a great quote attributed to Morphy:

"The ability to play chess is the sign of a gentleman. The ability to play chess well is the sign of a wasted life.")

Re: Perl's decline was cultural

#159

Post by petre »

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

It's not complexity, it's magic. Useful when one cannot be bothered to write array.length. So is if (@a) when the array is empty.

Re: Perl's decline was cultural

#160

Post by jancsika »

> None of this is literally serious,

Exactly.

I remember someone telling me to RTFM when I posted a question on IRC back in the 90s. Luckily, I explicitly asked if they were serious. They responded of course not-- they were kidding!

Then they PM'd me with hidden link that had an image map of Perl wizards with whom I could schedule a free meeting and coffee to get started as a newbie. I was skeptical-- who cares about some random noob from the interwebs?!? Well, Perl, apparently. That face-to-face meeting left me with goosebumps that I feel to this day when I think back on it. It turned out to be an important confidence booster and my chief way into programming.

I don't think it's an exaggeration to say that without Perl's focus on outreach I would never have served as president of Software Local 2142.

Like my wizard mentor told me when I tried to pay for the coffee that afternoon: Perl it forward!

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