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Perl's decline was cultural

beatworm.co.uk

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Re: Perl's decline was cultural

#161

Post by Klonoar »

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…

It is not a great language.

It is, however, a significant language. It has left a mark and influence on the culture and industry of programming. Nothing to sneeze at.

Re: Perl's decline was cultural

#162

Post by nagaiaida »

eduction wrote: post #65
tguvot wrote: post #14

I spent year developing CMS in Perl in 1999 (HTA application with ActivePerl. wonder if anybody else did something like this). It traumatized me, and first thing that I did in my next job is to learn python and develop some core systems in it. Few of my friends moved from perl to python as well. I still remember spending time with my coworkers on bench outside of building trying to figure out #@$%$^&$%@something = []…

Perl heads are downvoting you but I agree as a longtime ex Perl user that the sigils were noisy nonsense. The original intent was you could see var types with them - $scalar, @array, %hash. They immediately broke this by deciding the sigil would apply to the value /extracted/ from the data structure. So you declared array @foo but accessed an element as $foo[1]. What? There’s a logic there but already you’re violatin…

and people wonder why raku had so many things it needed to change to free the excellent core of the language and its ideas

Re: Perl's decline was cultural

#163

Post by ascendantlogic »

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.

Individuals are rarely (not never, but rarely) the full problem. Groups of people are what cause feedback loops and cultural reinforcement like the author describes. Sometimes this is a virtuous reinforcement cycle but more often than not the well gets poisoned over time.

Re: Perl's decline was cultural

#165

Post by JoshTriplett »

MangoToupe wrote: post #151
JoshTriplett wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It would absolutely have been harder. But the pain of going that path might potentially have been less than the pain of the Python 2 to Python 3 transition. Or, possibly, it wouldn't have been; I'm not claiming the tradeoff is obvious even in hindsight here.

Re: Perl's decline was cultural

#166

Post by fenazego »

My first and only experience with Perl was like this: in 1997, just for fun, I tried to write a program in Perl to turn my Mozilla bookmarks into a website. After a week of not succeeding, in frustration I decided to try Python. In two days I had what I wanted, and programming it was a joy. That sealed my judgement that Perl (and all of its culture) was not for me, so I'm not surprised at all that others might feel the same. (To be fair, there's a single oneliner that does make life a lot easier: ... | perl -pe 's{...}{...}')

Re: Perl's decline was cultural

#167

Post by pavel_lishin »

phil21 wrote: post #126
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’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”.

Was Perl one of your first languages by any chance? I freely admit that I've only been poking at it for a few months; maybe by this time next year, I'll be boggled at the comment I left, like it was written by a different person.

> in between “bash script” and “real developer”.

One of my coworkers gave me some great perspective by saying, "at least it's not written in Bash!"

Re: Perl's decline was cultural

#168

Post by pavel_lishin »

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…

But I can look at most Python code and be able to understand what it does. With perl, I have to look up so much.

- Why is there a `1;` on a single line in the middle of this file?

- What is `$_`?

- This parallel execution manager doesn't actually seem to define what code needs to run in parallel in any specific way, how does this work?

- What is this BEGIN block at the start of this Perl file? Why is that necessary?

- What's going on with qx, qw, qq?

- What does chomp do when it's just on its own line, with no arguments given to it?

Re: Perl's decline was cultural

#169

Post by GPerson »

edoceo wrote: post #103
tmp10423288442 wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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)

Did you come up with that? If so, bravo!

Re: Perl's decline was cultural

#170

Post by pavel_lishin »

creer wrote: post #85
pavel_lishin wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "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…

> in 2026, it'll be 11 developers writing it over 11 years. Perhaps too, a tool that's been around and in active maintenance for 11 years has been wildly successful.

I wouldn't say "wildly". I would say that it's critical enough to the company's workings that they devote enough resources to it to keep it going, but not enough resources to consider re-writing it or re-factoring it to be easier to work on.
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