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Perl's decline was cultural

beatworm.co.uk

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Re: Perl's decline was cultural

#241

Post by writtiewrat »

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…

Reasoning through analogies?

Re: Perl's decline was cultural

#242

Post by wlonkly »

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.

Larry was (and presumably is, but I'm out of that loop) a gem. The Weird Al of programming languages. Hilarious and kind.

But those who remember the regulars of, say, efnet #perl (THIS ISN'T A HELP CHANNEL), there was a dearth of kindness for sure. I was probably part of it too, because that was the culture! This is where the wizards live, why are you here asking us questions?

Like cms, I'm also hesitant to name names, but the folks I'm thinking of were definitely perl-famous in their day.

There were also a bunch of great people in the community, and they helped me launch my career in tech in the 90s, and I have close internet friends from that community to this day (and great memories of some who have passed on). But there were definitely also jerks.

Re: Perl's decline was cultural

#243

Post by wlonkly »

atherton94027 wrote: post #17
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.

There was so much complexity hidden behind "do what I mean". For example, scalar vs array context which was super subtle: my @var = @array # copy the array my $var = @array # return the count of elements in array

It's funny, because something like

    array var = array  # copied
    int var = array    # length
or

    var = array  # copied
    var = array.to_i  # length
is less subtle to me but I can't put my finger on why.

Re: Perl's decline was cultural

#244

Post by writtiewrat »

altairprime wrote: post #143
calmbonsai wrote: post #16

No. Perl died because other languages starting having an equivalent to CPAN and its extremely flexible syntax does not scale for medium to large team coordination.

It does if you restrict flexibility, but one of the critical flaws in Perl culture was the belief in letting everyone evolve in different directions while cooperating. It’s a genuinely charming belief, but it’s also explicitly incompatible with ‘interchangeable parts’ employment, and tends to only work in an environment where every individual is the ‘wizard’ lord of their personal domain over code. Even if you manage…

Some of the reasons why I never bothered with Perl was that I had the perception that it, like Ruby, encouraged mutating and modifying classes on the fly, willy-nilly. And the lack of static typing. Python also did not have static typing (it has some optional typing now or something like it), but my perception was that monkeypatching was not abused as much in Python as it might be in Perl and Ruby. Not that I used Python a lot.

Re: Perl's decline was cultural

#245

Post by writtiewrat »

getnormality wrote: post #54

The lede says Perl died because it was "reactionary" and "culturally conservative", but the content says Perl died because it had bad culture, the culture of angry, socially corrosive anonymous internet commenters. If Perl had had a good culture, then conserving it would have been good!

[flagged]

Re: Perl's decline was cultural

#246

Post by writtiewrat »

darrenf wrote: post #134

> [TIMTOWTDI] literally means 'there is more than one way to do it in Perl' - and you can perhaps infer from that that there's little to no reason to do it using anything else Not my experience at all, FWIW. For me, and the vast majority of Perl devs I’ve worked with over the past 30 years, TIMTOWTDI absolutely means some of the “ways to do it” don’t involve Perl, and that’s not only OK but expected. Of course Perl i…

How popular was/is monkeypatching in Perl?

Re: Perl's decline was cultural

#247

Post by writtiewrat »

lemonwaterlime wrote: post #61

Rather than its "decline was", Perl's existence is cultural. All programming languages (or any thought tools) are reflections and projections of the cognitive values of the community who creates and maintains them. In short, the Perl language shares the structure of the typical Perl dev's mind. A shift to Python or Ruby is fundamentally a shift to a different set of core cognitive patterns. This influences how proble…

Sorry for this repetition, but how popular was/is monkeypatching in Perl?

Re: Perl's decline was cultural

#248

Post by array_key_first »

stack_framer wrote: post #218
valiant55 wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

There is zero way you don't alienate anyone. Ask women software engineers if they ever feel alienated. That's the reason why some communities like the python community do outreach for minorities in tech.

I'm a white man, and I have never felt "alienated" in so-called progressive spaces.

Re: Perl's decline was cultural

#249

Post by writtiewrat »

sammy2255 wrote: post #53

I don't understand how Perl fell off and PHP didn't

As someone who doesn't really know neither Perl nor PHP, PHP is more of a domain-specific EDSL than a mainstream programming language.

One of the few insights in the blog post that aren't stupid, fake, inconsistent and schizophrenic, is the one about PHP's common approach regarding spinning up new processes.

Re: Perl's decline was cultural

#250

Post by writtiewrat »

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.

[flagged]
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