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Perl's decline was cultural

beatworm.co.uk

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Re: Perl's decline was cultural

#301

Post by INTPenis »

Perl was my first favourite programming language, used it for most things, from 1999 until switching to Python in 2012.

I still find the occasional Perl script in my current job, usually going through someone's legacy infrastructure, and I always have the same reaction, "phew I'm glad I switched to Python".

That reaction has nothing to do with the culture, it's 100% technical.

Just a few of the main points, I don't know why Perl coders were so adverse to comments, it's almost like some of us took a perverse pleasure in producing the most illegible piece of code.

It's like a stream of someone's consciousness.

I used to take pride in being fluent in PCRE, as well as some other dialects, and looking through an old Perl script you easily see why, it's used on every 10th line. And it always strikes me with a sense of relief when I realize all those instances of Regex are solved in a more OOP/Pythonic way today. Regex is something I reserve for edge cases.

Re: Perl's decline was cultural

#302

Post by chrisandchris »

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 have never worked (in Prod) with Perl, but my introduction to programming was with PHP and all I know IMHO is that PHP was/is so easy to start with. One of the reasons I picked PHP over other languages.

Re: Perl's decline was cultural

#303

Post by symbogra »

bsder wrote: post #251
symbogra wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Python 3 was a disaster and enterprises were still undertaking pointless 2->3 upgrade projects 10 years later

Except that Python took the other path when migrating from Python 1 to Python 2 and ... guess what? That was a "disaster" too. The only difference was that by the time of Python 3, Python programs were orders of magnitude bigger so the pain was that much worse.

Differences of scale do make a qualitative difference and must be considered when doing a migration.

Re: Perl's decline was cultural

#304

Post by psadri »

25 years ago Perl allowed you to express what was in your head 10x more concisely as in other mainstream language (which have since caught up with some of the features).

This was not the best when it came to others (or even yourself 6 months later) reading the code. But it was great for cranking stuff out that was simply too tedious in other languages.

Re: Perl's decline was cultural

#305

Post by huflungdung »

INTPenis wrote: post #301

Perl was my first favourite programming language, used it for most things, from 1999 until switching to Python in 2012. I still find the occasional Perl script in my current job, usually going through someone's legacy infrastructure, and I always have the same reaction, "phew I'm glad I switched to Python". That reaction has nothing to do with the culture, it's 100% technical. Just a few of the main points, I don't k…

[dead]

Re: Perl's decline was cultural

#306

Post by bigstrat2003 »

PunchyHamster wrote: post #239
skywhopper wrote: post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is the story that Python tells about itself. Meanwhile, folks who don’t use it every day are constantly learning that it’s only true within a single version of Python, but that over the years there will be multiple, incompatible ways to do niche wild rare stuff like … iterating over a map.

...that's why I used "was". Current direction of the language mostly goes against the "Zen of Python".

Python has never actually followed the Zen of Python, which is one of my gripes with it. For example, "explicit is better than implicit" is a bad joke given how Python implicitly treats non-boolean types as booleans.

Re: Perl's decline was cultural

#307

Post by bigstrat2003 »

skywhopper wrote: post #215
OptionOfT wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I actually think it works when you are in the ecosystem fulltime for a good while. But having to interact with it once in a while is always a hurdle. The same with bash. Do I use [ or [[? Where does the semi-colon go? if then fi, but while do done (and not elihw). -eq or =? Functions have () but no parameters. I'm sure those things make sense when all you write is Bash / Perl, but it's daunting. Now, Python can get p…

You realize you can learn all of this easily online, I hope? Sure it turns out that a scripting language maintaining compatibility with scripts from 40+ years ago has some confusing aspects. That’s the price of such incredible staying power.

The point is not that such quirks are impossible to learn; the point is that they make the language extremely unpleasant to use.

Re: Perl's decline was cultural

#308

Post by procaryote »

By a lot of metrics it was a pretty awful language; hard to read, implicit, inconsistent, uncomfortable to write due to all the special characters etc. The idea of default arguments alone should have killed it by being a monumentally bad idea.

In my recollection perl6 helped kill it by making perl5 stagnate, but hopefully it would have died regardless.

Re: Perl's decline was cultural

#309

Post by bigstrat2003 »

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.

Agreed. The Rust community is an incredibly toxic place because they are so determined to involve politics in tech. I love the language, but I stay as far away from the community as I possibly can.

Re: Perl's decline was cultural

#310

Post by tsimionescu »

aorloff wrote: post #282
SoftTalker wrote: post #265

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ?

If you are familiar with all of these but not C or Java or some other "traditional" programming language, then yes, I think anyone would guess you were a sysadmin. This was the type of background GP was talking about - people familiar with shell scripting but not any other programming language, who come by Perl for the first time.
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