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Perl's decline was cultural

beatworm.co.uk

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Re: Perl's decline was cultural

#291

Post by partomniscient »

EgregiousCube wrote: post #194
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?…

Honestly, $_ and "what does a function do when I don't supply any arguments?" are really nice in Perl, and not that difficult to understand. I think a lot of languages could use a 'default variable'.

$_ was one of the things that put me off perl, because the same syntax meant different things depending on context.

The Pragmatic Programmers had just started praising Ruby, so I opted for the that over Perl, and just went with it ever since. Hated PHP and didn't like Python's whitespace thing. I never Ruby on Rails'd either. That said my first interactive website was effectively a hello world button with cgi/perl.

But trying to learn to code from reading other peoples perl scripts was way harder than the (then) newer language alternatives.

Now I'm over 50 none of that is nearly as important. I remember being young and strongly opininated, this vs. that - its just part of the journey, and the culture. It also explains the current FizzBuzz in CSS minimisation post. We do because we can, not necessarily because we should.

Re: Perl's decline was cultural

#292

Post by MangoToupe »

JoshTriplett wrote: post #259
kstrauser wrote: post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m a little confused. That’s basically with Python 3 did, right? In py2, “foo” is a string of bytes, and u”foo” is Unicode. In py3, both are Unicode, and bytes() is a string of bytes.

The difference is that the two don't interoperate. You can't import a Python 3 module from Python 2 or vice versa; you have to use completely separate interpreters to run them. I'm suggesting a model in which one interpreter runs both Python 2 and Python 3, and the underlying types are the same, so you can pass them between the two. You'd have to know that "foo" created in Python 2 is the equivalent of b"foo" created…

Ok who would suggest this when the community could take a modicum of responsibility

Re: Perl's decline was cultural

#293

Post by MangoToupe »

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.

Yes, exactly. customers need to stop acting like a bitch if they wanna be taken seriously

Re: Perl's decline was cultural

#294

Post by AlexCoventry »

Ferret7446 wrote: post #261
lamontcg wrote: post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

It was definitely a thing.

Re: Perl's decline was cultural

#295

Post by bpbp-mango »

I tried to learn perl a few times early in my career, we still had some old perl internal sites and a bit of tooling written in it. I really struggled to find good resources on the web at the time, and most of the perl I was exposed to was so badly written as to be incomprehensible to me. I knew C and Python at the time.

I wonder how common my experience was and why the next gen (at the time) I was part of never learned it

Re: Perl's decline was cultural

#296

Post by Suppafly »

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.

>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.

This, it was very unixy and felt like a natural progression from shell scripting. I think that's why a lot of early linux adopters were so enamored.

Re: Perl's decline was cultural

#297

Post by zippyman55 »

autoexec wrote: post #120
neuroelectron wrote: post #79

Perl being so old means it's extremely fast for what it's designed to do, process streams or pipes. In a few tasks, it's faster than C, but being much faster to create a script or program that is useful, and with the implicit syntactic sugar, and since it's so flexible, you can just do things in the one way you know how and that's usually good enough. Python is pretty good too for this and because modern computers ar…

Perl is amazing when it comes to regular expressions too. It's one of the reasons why perl is way more fun to write than Python. I still use perl for regex heavy tasks. I wish that python had integrated regex into the language the same way.

My fingers have long forgotten all the PERL they once knew. But it was always pleasant.

Re: Perl's decline was cultural

#298

Post by Suppafly »

jancsika wrote: post #160

> None of this is literally serious, Exactly. I remember someone telling me to RTFM when I posted a question on IRC back in the 90s. Luckily, I explicitly asked if they were serious. They responded of course not-- they were kidding! Then they PM'd me with hidden link that had an image map of Perl wizards with whom I could schedule a free meeting and coffee to get started as a newbie. I was skeptical-- who cares about…

I can't tell if this is real or real funny.

Re: Perl's decline was cultural

#299

Post by david_shaw »

Yes: in retrospect, the Perl community (and maybe even the language in general) was cringe-worthy and perhaps even toxic.

But at the time, that elite and esoteric language drew me and many others to it in much the same way that *BSD and arguably even Linux did. The way that programming computers in general did.

It wasn't a pleasant vibe that anyone should strive to recreate, but Perl was something that felt cool to many nerds back then. Perl's decline being cultural is a good thing: it's because the industry grew and matured.

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