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Perl's decline was cultural

beatworm.co.uk

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Re: Perl's decline was cultural

#221

Post by ojosilva »

dehrmann wrote: post #152
eduction wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yes there was a reason as Perl took inspiration from Lisp - everything is a list- and everyone knows how quick C's variadic arguments get nasty.

So @_ was a response to that issue, given Perl was about being dynamic and not typed and there were no IDEs or linters that would type-check and refactor code based on function signatures.

JS had the same issue forever and finally implemented a rest/spread operator in ES6. Python had variadic from the start but no rest operator until Python3. Perl had spread/rest for vargs in the late 80s already. For familiarity, Perl chose the @ operator that meant vargs in bourne shell in the 70s.

Re: Perl's decline was cultural

#222

Post by JoshTriplett »

kstrauser wrote: post #190
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…

That split between bytes and unicode made better code. Bytes are what you get from the network. Is it a PNG? A paragraph of text? Who knows! But in Python 2, you treated them both as the same thing: a series of bytes. Being more or less forced to decode that series into a string of text where appropriate made a huge number of bugs vanish. Oops, forget to run `value=incoming_data.decode()` before passing incoming data…

That distinction is indeed critical, and I'm not suggesting removing that distinction. My point is that you could give all those types names, and manage the transition by having Python 3 change the defaults (e.g. that a string is unicode).

Re: Perl's decline was cultural

#224

Post by kstrauser »

JoshTriplett wrote: post #222
kstrauser wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That split between bytes and unicode made better code. Bytes are what you get from the network. Is it a PNG? A paragraph of text? Who knows! But in Python 2, you treated them both as the same thing: a series of bytes. Being more or less forced to decode that series into a string of text where appropriate made a huge number of bugs vanish. Oops, forget to run `value=incoming_data.decode()` before passing incoming data…

That distinction is indeed critical, and I'm not suggesting removing that distinction. My point is that you could give all those types names, and manage the transition by having Python 3 change the defaults (e.g. that a string is unicode).

I’m a little confused. That’s basically with Python 3 did, right? In py2, “foo” is a string of bytes, and u”foo” is Unicode. In py3, both are Unicode, and bytes() is a string of bytes.

Re: Perl's decline was cultural

#225

Post by librasteve »

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 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

That is just how I felt about Perl (4 years full time dev in the 2000s) and how I now feel about https://raku.org (aka Perl6). Anyway, I tried to gather some fellow feelings here about 18 months ago:

https://rakujourney.wordpress.com/2024/05/22/perl-love-notes...

It is sad that Perl became so despised after the error of preannouncing a non-compatible upgrade. I understand that people couldn't wait. But Raku is here now and it is worth a second look imo.

Re: Perl's decline was cultural

#226

Post by skydhash »

skywhopper wrote: post #203
asa400 wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

There’s nothing that can replace bash for what it does. People have been trying for decades. You’ll be happier if you accept that bash can and will happily coexist with anything and everything else, which is exactly why it will never go away.

CLI usage revolves around text and bash is a meta layer above that. Given curl, jq, and awk, you can create a quick MVP client for almost any api. Doing the same in Python and Go is much more involved.

Re: Perl's decline was cultural

#227

Post by lamontcg »

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 always found the Perl "community" to be really off-putting with all the monk and wizard nonsense.

Rubyists vs. Pythonistas isn't any better.

Programming languages as counter-cultural lifestyle choices is pretty "cringe" as the kids say.

Re: Perl's decline was cultural

#228

Post by overfeed »

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 always found the Perl "community" to be really off-putting with all the monk and wizard nonsense

The Perl community introduced the world to the first language module repositories via CPAN. No more manually hunting down tarballs off FTP servers

As a language, Perl is extremely expressive, which is amazing for one-off scripts, and awful for code that's meant to be shared and/or reread. For pure text-munging, Perl is still unbeaten, when using Perl-Compatible regexes in other languages, I feel the language getting in my way.

You can write easy-to-read Perl (TIMTOWTDI, and all that), but it doesn't force you like Go (small language size) or Python (by convention and culture, on what counts as 'Pythonic')

Re: Perl's decline was cultural

#229

Post by edoceo »

GPerson wrote: post #169
edoceo wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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!

6-7? No, my kid says it about a thousand time a day. Then, for some unknown reason they follow it with 41! WTF! I've shouted 42! many times and have tried to inform the child of the significant cultural and scientific importance of 42. Which, IIRC, factors to 2,3,7.

Re: Perl's decline was cultural

#230

Post by programd »

tasty_freeze wrote: post #156
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....

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.

I'll go further. Ignore the Perl specific bits and Conway's "Perl Best Practices" is one of the best general programming books ever written.

It has so many great pieces of advice that apply to any programming task, everything from naming variables, to testing, error handling, code organization, documentation, etc, etc. Ultimately, for timeless advice on programming as a profession the language is immaterial.

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