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Perl's decline was cultural

beatworm.co.uk

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Re: Perl's decline was cultural

#281

Post by majormajor »

I never interacted with the "Perl community" described here. When I used Perl in a past job it was in the "just google for how to do things" era.

The syntax, full of @ and %, was convoluted and made you have to think about more things compared to Ruby or Python without giving you that much apparent power or benefit (as opposed to when you'd need to think about types more in Java or a C-family language).

Neither Ruby, Python, nor Perl were in my first three languages (Pascal, C/C++, Java were those). Ruby, Python, Matlab, R, and Perl all came later for me, within a few years of each other. Perl did not have anything like the approachability of Ruby and Python coming from that Pascal/C/Java background.

(IMO Python is losing some of that now, especially like in the last project I encountered in a professional capacity in Python where optional type hinting was used but wasn't always accurate which was a special sort of hell.)

EDIT: the article even touches on this some in its description of Ruby: "Ruby is a language for programmers, and is at this point an sensible candidate for building something like Rails with - a relatively blank canvas for dynamic programming, with many of the same qualities as Perl, with less legacy cruft, and more modern niceties, like an integrated object system, exceptions, straightforward data structures." Ruby was newer, and wasn't something that grew out of sysadmin tools, but was always a full fledged OO application programming language first. So my disagreement with the article is that the culture then doesn't matter because no perl culture changes would've been able to reinvent the language as a nicer, newer language like Ruby because it never would've been perl anymore at that point.

Re: Perl's decline was cultural

#282

Post by aorloff »

SoftTalker wrote: post #265
phil21 wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

If I am familiar with sed, awk, grep and xargs, was I a sysadmin ?

Re: Perl's decline was cultural

#283

Post by [deleted] »

SoftTalker wrote: post #269
MangoToupe wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

[deleted]

Re: Perl's decline was cultural

#284

Post by thaumasiotes »

majormajor wrote: post #281

I never interacted with the "Perl community" described here. When I used Perl in a past job it was in the "just google for how to do things" era. The syntax, full of @ and %, was convoluted and made you have to think about more things compared to Ruby or Python without giving you that much apparent power or benefit (as opposed to when you'd need to think about types more in Java or a C-family language). Neither Ruby,…

> the last project I encountered in a professional capacity in Python where optional type hinting was used but wasn't always accurate which was a special sort of hell.

But that's the entire purpose of optional type hinting. If the hints had to be accurate, you'd have mandatory typing, not optional hinting.

Re: Perl's decline was cultural

#285

Post by [deleted] »

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.…

[deleted]

Re: Perl's decline was cultural

#286

Post by AlexCoventry »

tasty_freeze wrote: post #145
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 isn't bad language design that you need to study the language before you can use it. I look at haskell programs and it looks mysterious to me because I haven't spent any time studying it, but I'd not thing to say it is bad language design. Yes, one can write obscure perl code and some love perl golfing. In the same way there is an IOCCC which delights in unreadable code, it doesn't mean that the C language should…

When I was choosing between learning python and perl in the late 90's, it was the context sensitivity of perl expressions which really squicked me. To me, that was the critically bad language decision in perl. You can make context-sensitive expressions in python (using operator overloading, for instance), but you have to go out of your way to do it in one way or another. In perl you can easily do it by accident, and it can result in serious bugs. It seemed masochistic, to me.

Re: Perl's decline was cultural

#287

Post by cjs_ac »

overfeed wrote: post #228
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 i…

CPAN was inspired by CTAN, the Comprehensive TeX Archive Network.

Re: Perl's decline was cultural

#288

Post by nmz »

pavel_lishin wrote: post #168
tasty_freeze wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It isn't bad language design that you need to study the language before you can use it. I look at haskell programs and it looks mysterious to me because I haven't spent any time studying it, but I'd not thing to say it is bad language design. Yes, one can write obscure perl code and some love perl golfing. In the same way there is an IOCCC which delights in unreadable code, it doesn't mean that the C language should…

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?…

If you think that's bad, try learning python or a verbose language while not speaking english, all of these words like while, for, if, else, break are just gibberish and your code just reeks of some weird mish mash of broken english and broken , I have a hypothesis that terseness favors universality, if you don't speak english, something like $_ is equal or easier to grasp, it honestly just looks like terse and weird math.

Re: Perl's decline was cultural

#289

Post by majormajor »

thaumasiotes wrote: post #284
majormajor wrote: post #281

I never interacted with the "Perl community" described here. When I used Perl in a past job it was in the "just google for how to do things" era. The syntax, full of @ and %, was convoluted and made you have to think about more things compared to Ruby or Python without giving you that much apparent power or benefit (as opposed to when you'd need to think about types more in Java or a C-family language). Neither Ruby,…

> the last project I encountered in a professional capacity in Python where optional type hinting was used but wasn't always accurate which was a special sort of hell. But that's the entire purpose of optional type hinting. If the hints had to be accurate, you'd have mandatory typing, not optional hinting.

I think the purpose of optional type hinting is that you don't have to add it everywhere all at once, not that it doesn't have to be accurate. I guess you could split hairs and say "hint" doesn't imply perfect accuracy, but... adding a language feature that can lie really seems to have a lot of downsides vs upsides; whereas at least optional has obvious migration benefits.

You could have optional type hints where the runtime would still yell at you - maybe even from just an optional flag - if you returned a string out of a function that should return an int.

Because as-is, once you have those function that says it returns an int but returns a string instead, etc, in a big codebase, your editor tooling gets really confused and it's way worse to work through than if the hints weren't there at all.

(And there are tools in Python that you can use to inspect and verify the accuracy. But those tools are also... optional... And if you start to apply them to a codebase where they weren't used, it can be very time-consuming to fix everything...)

Re: Perl's decline was cultural

#290

Post by MangoToupe »

JoshTriplett wrote: post #165
MangoToupe wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

It would absolutely have been harder. But the pain of going that path might potentially have been less than the pain of the Python 2 to Python 3 transition. Or, possibly, it wouldn't have been; I'm not claiming the tradeoff is obvious even in hindsight here.

I think you have causation reversed: it would have been at least two orders of magnitude greater to act like moving to python 3 was harder than staying. But you do you boo :emoji-kissey-face:
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