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Perl's decline was cultural

beatworm.co.uk

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Re: Perl's decline was cultural

#191

Post by asa400 »

pavel_lishin wrote: post #167
phil21 wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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!"

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

I wish bash was the thing that was dying. As an industry, we need to make better choices.

Re: Perl's decline was cultural

#193

Post by kstrauser »

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 = []…

Yesterday I used `pwgen` to role a random password, and at first glance I legit thought it might've been working Perl code. I'm not even slightly kidding.

Re: Perl's decline was cultural

#194

Post by EgregiousCube »

pavel_lishin wrote: post #168
tasty_freeze wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?…

Honestly, $_ and "what does a function do when I don't supply any arguments?" are really nice in Perl, and not that difficult to understand. I think a lot of languages could use a 'default variable'.

Re: Perl's decline was cultural

#195

Post by kstrauser »

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…

That last paragraph got me off Perl to Python. The first time I wrote Python like hash1[hash2]["key"] and it worked, then tried hash1[hash2]["array_name"][3] and it worked because that's the obvious way to write something, I fell in love and never looked back.

I never wanted to have to reason my way through chasing pointers through nested hashrefs again.

Re: Perl's decline was cultural

#196

Post by asa400 »

montroser wrote: post #184
pavel_lishin wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?…

Yeah, it's true that Perl did not have as a design goal that a complete newcomer should be able to intuitively understand the code without having any prior exposure to the language. There is a little bit of a learning curve, and that was completely expected by Perl's creators. Yes, you have to learn about the idioms above, but they became second-nature. For many of us, the model clicked in our heads and the terseness…

> And yet, as the industry grew and all sorts of people from all sorts of backgrounds converged in this space, the tolerance and appetite for funky/terse waned in favor of explicit/verbose/accessible. It's probably for the better in the end, but it did feel a little bit like the mom-and-pop store on the corner that had weird pickled things at the register and a meemaw in the back got replaced by a generic Circle K with a lesser soul.

This is an amazing point that I haven't seen anyone else make about languages in this way.

As someone who got into the industry right after Perl's heyday and never learned or used it but learned programming from some former Perl power users, Perl has a pre-corporate/anarchic/punk feel about it that is completely opposite to something like Golang that feels like it was developed by a corporation, for a corporation. Perl is wacky, but it feels alive (the language itself, if not the community). By contrast, Golang feels dead, soulless.

Re: Perl's decline was cultural

#197

Post by stack_framer »

Should the Rust community take a lesson here, and maybe the Zig community to an extent?

To me it seems that some in the Rust community in particular, perhaps because they're just the most vocal, are tightly coupled to progressive, social activism.

I guess in general I just find myself wishing that political and social issues could be entirely left out of technical communities.

Re: Perl's decline was cultural

#198

Post by rcarmo »

This tracks. My own experience was that I moved from Perl to Python (for system and API stuff) and PHP (for templating and HTML).

The only thing I kept using Perl for over a decade was RADIUS (we ran Radiator, which was arguably the most insanely flexible AAA server for ISPs)

Re: Perl's decline was cultural

#199

Post by baxtr »

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 loved Perl and all the obscurity. It felt like black magic back then. It should have become what python is today.

Re: Perl's decline was cultural

#200

Post by aaronbrethorst »

sph wrote: post #144
rightbyte wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Dude it is not cringe. It is silly. Pretending to be a all serius grown ups language is cringe.

I agree but don’t forget that the average programmer nowadays is a strait-laced corporate entity, whose personality is Node.js stickers on a macbook, like everybody else in their team. They forget that Perl and co. were written by people that had one too many tabs of LSD in the 70s, sporting long hair and a ponytail.

I’m going to go out on a limb and guess that Larry Wall, a devout evangelical Christian and the child of a pastor, was not turning on, tuning in, or dropping out in the 1970s.
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