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Perl's decline was cultural

beatworm.co.uk

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Re: Perl's decline was cultural

#261

Post by Ferret7446 »

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.

I don't think "Pythonista" was a thing in the 2000s. Python is very old and only became more of a "fad" relatively recently.

Re: Perl's decline was cultural

#263

Post by keepamovin »

pomatic wrote: post #58
keepamovin wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My language learning trajectory (from 10 years old) was 8086 assembly, QBASIC, C, Perl, Java, MAGMA, JavaScript/HTML/CSS, Python, Haskell, C++, vibe coding

How old are you now? Mid fifties here. And 'vibe coding' in what exactly - it is not of interest from a programming perspective, but from a 'what does the AI know best perspective'? I've followed a similar, but not identical trajectory and now vibe in python/htmx/flask without needing to review the code in depth (NB internal apps, not public facing ones), with claude code max. Vibe coding in the last 6-8 weeks now al…

35–44. Same thing, sometimes it makes planning errors, or misses context that should be obvious based on the files, but overall a huge booster. No need to review in depth, just set it against tests and let it iterate. So much potential, so exciting.

My feeling is the current suite of LLMs are "not smarter than US" they simply have far greater knowledge, unlimited focus, and unconstrained energy (modulo plan/credits/quotas of course!). I can't wait for the AIs that are actually smarter than us. Exciting to see what they'll do.

Re: Perl's decline was cultural

#264

Post by alsetmusic »

AndrewDavis wrote: post #233
alsetmusic wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I only recently learned about this, maybe a month ago. It made a lot of sense to me.

Re: Perl's decline was cultural

#265

Post by SoftTalker »

phil21 wrote: post #126
pavel_lishin wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm having to pick up some perl now, and while I don't interact with the community, it surely _feels_ like it was written by wizards, for wizards. Obscure, non-intuitive oneliners, syntax that feels like it was intentionally written to be complicated, and a few other things that feel impossible to understand without reading the docs. (Before everyone jumps on me - yes, as a developer, I should be able to read documen…

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”.

I think if you were a sysadmin and used to shell scripts, sed, awk, grep and xargs then perl probably made more sense than if you were a programmer from a more traditional language coming into the perl world.

Re: Perl's decline was cultural

#266

Post by SoftTalker »

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.

Don't forget many people were still on dial-up and long forum posts were probably discouraged in favor of RTFM or other terse reply.

Re: Perl's decline was cultural

#267

Post by SoftTalker »

zahlman wrote: post #36
daedrdev wrote: post #6

I think a big part is does someone starting to program even hear that Perl exists? No, and they start learning python and so have little need to learn Perl after that

That's why it has stayed dead. But that can't explain how it died. People don't just spontaneously stop hearing about the existence of a programming language in common use.

How did vbscript die? How did php die? Better alternatives came along and sucked up the oxygen.

Re: Perl's decline was cultural

#268

Post by SoftTalker »

sammy2255 wrote: post #53

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

PHP has fallen off. Who is doing anything new in PHP?

PHP has a much bigger legacy of web stuff than Perl, because it was so much easier to use. But there's no future in it. Wordpress, Drupal, Joomla... all had their time but it's all in the past.

Re: Perl's decline was cultural

#269

Post by SoftTalker »

MangoToupe wrote: post #151
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…

> With the benefit of hindsight, though, Python 3 could have been done as a non-breaking upgrade. Not without enormous and unnecessary pain.

Pain on whose part? There was certainly pain porting all the code that had to be ported to Python 3 so that the Python developers could have an easier time.

Re: Perl's decline was cultural

#270

Post by themafia »

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.

I switched to ruby because of the quality of the MRI for writing extensions. It was literally a revolution. No more SWIG, no more complex type magic, no more struggles to compile my module on end users systems. This was all wrapped by up gem as well so the switch was genuinely impossible to avoid.

This was all also at a time when Perl 6 was first starting to emerge from the vapor. The extremely wishy washy and decade long development track they put themselves on finally destroyed any notion of ever even returning to Perl. It served as the motivation to hoist all my old Perl code into ruby code.

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