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Perl's decline was cultural

beatworm.co.uk

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Re: Perl's decline was cultural

#211

Post by skywhopper »

PunchyHamster wrote: post #122
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,…

That is the story that Python tells about itself. Meanwhile, folks who don’t use it every day are constantly learning that it’s only true within a single version of Python, but that over the years there will be multiple, incompatible ways to do niche wild rare stuff like … iterating over a map.

Re: Perl's decline was cultural

#212

Post by 0xbadcafebee »

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.

> it was just not a good language compared to others

I think this was one of those things people just repeated, rather than having concrete examples from experience. It's like people saying a Toyota Corolla is better than a Honda Civic. Is it really? Or are they really just two different forms of the same thing? They both get you to the grocery store, they're both very reliable, small cheap. Having a preference is not the same thing as one actually being superior to the other.

Re: Perl's decline was cultural

#213

Post by mr_toad »

ErikCorry wrote: post #180
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.

The syntax problems are just surface. There are some real problems underneath: Poor performance of the single implementation. A single implementation. Leaky ref counted GC, but 'luckily' the syntax for references is so clunky that nobody does anything complicated enough that it really matters. Bolted on object oriented features that never got the love they needed at a time when oo languages were sweeping the world. M…

> 'luckily' the syntax for references is so clunky that nobody does anything complicated enough that it really matters.

That made me laugh. Unlike actually working with Perl references, which made me want to cry.

Re: Perl's decline was cultural

#214

Post by ahartmetz »

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've always found Perl just plain ugly, too clever about some things (like iterating over regex matches on stdin or something) and really dumb about other things (variable syntax, the god-awful OOP system). Python is clean and pretty in comparison and usually well thought out. If the communities were reversed, I'd still prefer Python: I just read the documentation in 99% of cases, I very rarely need to interact with the community. Python, as the article says, is mostly not a language for fans - it's mostly for auxiliary tasks.

Re: Perl's decline was cultural

#215

Post by skywhopper »

OptionOfT wrote: post #174
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 actually think it works when you are in the ecosystem fulltime for a good while. But having to interact with it once in a while is always a hurdle. The same with bash. Do I use [ or [[? Where does the semi-colon go? if then fi, but while do done (and not elihw). -eq or =? Functions have () but no parameters. I'm sure those things make sense when all you write is Bash / Perl, but it's daunting. Now, Python can get p…

You realize you can learn all of this easily online, I hope? Sure it turns out that a scripting language maintaining compatibility with scripts from 40+ years ago has some confusing aspects. That’s the price of such incredible staying power.

Re: Perl's decline was cultural

#216

Post by syncsynchalt »

creer wrote: post #100
RayFrankenstein wrote: post #11

There was a lot of pressure in the Perl community to write things as succinctly as possible instead of as maintainably and understandably. That’s not realistic for use in a field with a lot of turnover and job hopping.

There was no such pressure. That's ridiculous. There were a lot of things people could grab as reasons to form an opinion without even reading articles, never mind the tutorial. They then ended up with php or python, even java for crying out loud, and years later THAT was a problem.

Code golfing originated in perl.

There was strong cultural pressure to be able to write perl in as few bytes as possible, ideally as a CLI one-liner. Books[1] were written on the topic.

https://www.thriftbooks.com/w/perl-one-liners-130-programs-t...

Re: Perl's decline was cultural

#217

Post by altairprime »

creer wrote: post #188
altairprime wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

You indeed ran into toxic environments. I don't feel that the common, new perl programmer intake path was anything like that. Not what I ever ran into. Support in forums and such was needlessly short in using RTFM as an answer. People could have pasted a one paragraph pointer to the documentation intake path and that would have helped.

It was EFnet/#perl which included most of the core development team. I don’t really have experience with the non-core social environment, sorry.

Re: Perl's decline was cultural

#218

Post by stack_framer »

valiant55 wrote: post #204
stack_framer wrote: post #197

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.

I'd love for politics to not infiltrate most aspects of life. Until everyone is able to, at least in part, persue life without being oppressed because of their immutable attributes, their belief or lack of belief system, who they choose to love and/or how they view themselves I think it's our civic duty to crusade for those causes.

> I think it's our civic duty to crusade for those causes

Why crusade using the resources of a technical community though? Surely it alienates the people who don't happen to align with the causes important to you.

There are myriad ways to perform your civic duty in your city. You could knock doors and encourage people to vote, for example. Why do it through a technical community?

Re: Perl's decline was cultural

#219

Post by never_inline »

zahlman wrote: post #64
amiga386 wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Perl's binary brings with it the ability to run every release of the language, from 5.8 onwards. You can mix and match Perl 5.30 code with 5.8 code with 5.20 code, whatever, just say "use v5.20.0;" at the start of each module or script. By comparison, Python can barely go one version without both introducing new things and removing old things from the language, so anything written in Python is only safe for a a fragi…

> By comparison, Python can barely go one version without both introducing new things and removing old things from the language Overwhelmingly, what gets removed is from the standard library, and it's extremely old stuff. As recently as 3.11 you could use `distutils` (the predecessor to Setuptools). And in 3.12 you could still use `pipes` (a predecessor to `subprocess` that nobody ever talked about even when `subproc…

asyncio.get_event_loop ?

Re: Perl's decline was cultural

#220

Post by librasteve »

baxtr wrote: post #199
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.

actually Perl was what Python is today - the go to scripting language
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