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Perl's decline was cultural

beatworm.co.uk

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Re: Perl's decline was cultural

#231

Post by creer »

syncsynchalt wrote: post #216
creer wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

One-liners is one of the ways you can use perl. You can also use it as the embedded language in some larger project. As perl CGI. As mod_perl. etc. There is no "cultural pressure" to use any of these. You can choose to mess around with one-liners and you can choose to spend time shaving a few characters off your code. Or not. None of this is the one true way. This is not python.

Re: Perl's decline was cultural

#232

Post by morshu9001 »

asa400 wrote: post #210
jerf wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Erlang is, by my accounting, not even a functional langauge at all. It takes more than just having immutable values to be functional, and forcing users to leave varibles as immutable was a mistake, which Elixir fixes. Erlang code in practice is just imperative code written with immutable values, and like a lot of other modern languages, occasional callouts to things borrowed from functional programming like "map", bu…

> Erlang is, by my accounting, not even a functional langauge at all. How do you figure? The essence of FP is functions of the shape `data -> data` rather than `data -> void`, deemphasizing object-based identity, and treating functions as first-class tools for abstraction. There's enough dynamic FP languages at this point to establish that these traits are held in common with the static FP languages. Is Clojure not a…

Pretty sure FP is exactly what you said. If it's not, I'm ok calling it a "no variables" language.

Re: Perl's decline was cultural

#233

Post by AndrewDavis »

alsetmusic wrote: post #189
phil21 wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yep, first language I learned. And since I was somewhat early to the Internet thing, I found IRC when I was about 14 years old and actually learned from a lot of the folks who have authored books on Perl or are at least (were) well known in the community. It certainly was the major factor in how I connected the dots! Haven’t really thought about it until now, but I suppose having Larry Wall and Randal Schwartz tellin…

Not the person you replied to, but I thought the same thing. Perl was my first as well, and it certainly shaped the way I think about coding. It made Python feel too rigid and Ruby feel familiar. There's something to be said for the restrictions of an environment when you're learning how to operate in a domain that seems to shape future thinking. I'm sure there are people who started in a language and later found som…

> There's something to be said for the restrictions of an environment when you're learning how to operate in a domain that seems to shape future thinking.

When at University the academic running the programming language course was adamant the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis applied to programming language. ie language influences the way you think.

Re: Perl's decline was cultural

#234

Post by BrenBarn »

tasty_freeze wrote: post #182
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?…

Again: python syntax is more akin to what you are used to, and so it feels more comfortable to you. $_ is inscrutable if you haven't studied perl, but the same thing would happen to anyone who sees a python decorator for the first time. what does "else: do after a while loop in python? Only people who know python know what it does (and I suspect most don't). The different quoting operators are also trivial to learn.…

It's not just a matter of "read the docs", though, because languages can differ in how many distinct concepts/constructs they employ. Python has gradually added more over the years but still I think is well short of Perl in this regard.

Re: Perl's decline was cultural

#235

Post by michaeld123 »

heikkilevanto wrote: post #201

I don't know, but for me Perl has not died at all. I still use it for smallish scripts and some CGI. Maybe I am an old retired fart, but it is the tool I reach for, when the problem looks like Perl-ish. Like I reach for C or other languages when I need that kind of things.

agreed. it's often in my toolbox -- mostly since I already know it, and I prefer semi-colon-driven syntax -- but it's just one of a few languages I use.

Re: Perl's decline was cultural

#236

Post by nocman »

syncsynchalt wrote: post #216
creer wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

> There was strong cultural pressure to be able to write perl in as few bytes as possible

Hard disagree. Many Perl programmers enjoyed engaging in code golf (always just for fun, in my experience), but in my nearly 30 years of programming Perl, I never encountered anything that I would call pressure to do so -- not from anyone.

Re: Perl's decline was cultural

#237

Post by troad »

PLenz wrote: post #192

I'm really, really confused by the typescript overtaking python comment, they're not really tackling the same domain of problems, right?

I thought it was really perceptive. Look at what JS was designed to do cf. what it's actually doing these days.

Turns out it doesn't really matter what domain you were originally trying to tackle. If you've stumbled upon a low friction way of achieving other things, people are going to use your tool for those things, even if it's not the optimal tool for those domains.

I dread the JS/TS future, but it's obviously coming.

Re: Perl's decline was cultural

#238

Post by zbentley »

lamontcg wrote: post #227
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.

> Rubyists vs. Pythonistas isn't any better.

Eh, in different ways. Ruby people often felt a little smug/over-emotive about how much joy using their tool could bring programmers. TFA is spot on about Perl: Perl folks often felt cliquish, arrogant, defensive. Python people are at times patronizing or overly dismissive.

And in all of those communities the biggest difference was how many people in the community had those dysfunctions, versus the rest—the vast majority of each language’s users who were using it, sharing techniques or code, answering questions about it without being jerks.

Where Perl fell down for me was that its community and people I knew who used it had a much higher chance of evidencing those crappy behaviors. More bad apples—not many in the grander scheme, but enough more to be noticed.

Re: Perl's decline was cultural

#239

Post by PunchyHamster »

skywhopper wrote: post #211
PunchyHamster wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

...that's why I used "was". Current direction of the language mostly goes against the "Zen of Python".

Re: Perl's decline was cultural

#240

Post by dragonwriter »

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,…

> the whole "one way to do a thing"

There’s a whole lot of words popularly excised (as you just did) from that line of the Zen to create a false polar opposite to Perl’s TMTOWTDI that was never actually part of Python’s philosophy.

The actual line from the Zen of Python is: “There should be one—and preferably only one—obvious way to do it.” (omissions in italics).

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