Perl was the duct tape of the Internet.
Regardless of the culture issues, it was effective!
Perl's decline was cultural
271–280 of 472 posts
Re: Perl's decline was cultural
#272The 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!
That was effectively the culture of the Internet in general at that time. It was the "wild west" for years, because, well, it _was_ a modern incarnation of the same phenomenon.
Re: Perl's decline was cultural
#273I 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'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…
>>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.
Those days were different. You could say what people are doing in months to years today, in many ways people back then were doing in days to weeks.
Pace and ambition of shipping has not only faded, that very culture is non existent. You don't see people building the next Facebook or Amazon these days, do you?
I remember managers asking Java programmers how much time it would take to get something done, and get timelines on months and years. They would come to us Perl programmers and get it done in a week.
The era didn't last long. I would joke around our team saying, ideally a Java programmer with 10 years experience was somewhat like like a Perl programmer with 1 year experience. This was one of the big reasons, most of these enterprise coders wanted Perl gone.
Re: Perl's decline was cultural
#274Perl failed because it's a write-only language. The only time you really understand a Perl program is when you're writing it. Check back in six months and good luck. It's like trying to read someone else's regular expression - and the connection between Perl and Regular Expressions is not accidental.
Re: Perl's decline was cultural
#275Earlier 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.
Seems somewhat related to Iverson's 1979 Turing Award lecture, "Notation as a Tool of Thought" (https://www.eecg.utoronto.ca/~jzhu/csc326/readings/iverson.p...)(https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25249563)
Re: Perl's decline was cultural
#276No. 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.
>>Perl died because other languages starting having an equivalent to CPAN
Last time I checked apart from npm, no other language has anything similar to CPAN.
Re: Perl's decline was cultural
#277I don't understand how Perl fell off and PHP didn't
mod_php was dramatically simpler to use than mod_perl. If the sysadmin set it up, you didn't need to know it was there, and your regular PHP just ran really fast. That and nothing else really copied the "scriptable HTML file" paradigm which some people really really liked and made a very low barrier to entry compared to Perl. That's really what kicked off the demise of Perl -- it stopped being the most accessible way onto the internet. PHP also didn't screw up their major language upgrades like Perl did.
RoR helped Ruby push off its inevitable demise for a while, but it's going the same way as Perl. Python got lucky that it's become the defacto choice for everything ML.
Re: Perl's decline was cultural
#278Earlier 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…
The term "surrogate activity" comes to mind, specifically, activities of no real value that some people like to waste time on to feel better about themselves.
People summit Qomolangma. (with logistics)
Re: Perl's decline was cultural
#279Earlier quoted context omitted.
Was Perl one of your first languages by any chance? I freely admit that I've only been poking at it for a few months; maybe by this time next year, I'll be boggled at the comment I left, like it was written by a different person. > in between “bash script” and “real developer”. One of my coworkers gave me some great perspective by saying, "at least it's not written in Bash!"
> 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.
Indeed. If I had to download and install bash … I wouldn’t!
I write bash scripts only because I can rely on it being there.
Re: Perl's decline was cultural
#280For me it wasn't cultural. Perl was my first language because I wanted to make interactive websites and that was the most common way to do it in the late 90s. Shortly after, everyone switched to PHP because mod_php was much faster than Perl CGI scripts.
Surely the people who had purely performance problems with Perl CGI scripts moved to mod_perl? I didn't figure out when mod_php was introduced from casual searching, but given that mod_perl is only a year younger than PHP it must've been available to almost anyone who was considering rewriting their app in PHP. So I have to imagine there were additional reasons.
Wikipedia says that this source [1] claims early versions of PHP were built on top of mod_perl, but I can't access the archive right now for some reason so I can't confirm.
[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20130625070202/http://www.theper...