311–320 of 472 posts
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.
>>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.
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> 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 th…
How is that "bad" solution different from this "good" one?
> 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.
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.
Perl's "decline" saved it from a fate worst than death: popularity and splitting into dozens of incompatible versions from added/removed features (like python). Instead Perl is just available everywhere in the same stable form. Scripts always can just use the system perl interpreter. And most of the time a script written in $currentyear can run just as well on a perl system interpreter from 2 decades ago (and vice ve…
Perl's binary brings with it the ability to run every release of the language, from 5.8 onwards. You can mix and match Perl 5.30 code with 5.8 code with 5.20 code, whatever, just say "use v5.20.0;" at the start of each module or script. By comparison, Python can barely go one version without both introducing new things and removing old things from the language, so anything written in Python is only safe for a a fragi…
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It’s interesting to me how brains work. Perl has always “flowed” for me and made mostly intuitive sense. Every other language I’ve had to hack on to get something done is a struggle for me to fit into some rigid-feeling mental box. I understand I’m the weird one, but man I miss Perl being an acceptable language to pound out a quick program in between “bash script” and “real developer”.
I think if you were a sysadmin and used to shell scripts, sed, awk, grep and xargs then perl probably made more sense than if you were a programmer from a more traditional language coming into the perl world.
On the other hand, I was able to easily pick up just about any "tradional" language I tried--from Basic and C in the 80s all the way to Dart and Go more recently.
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But I can look at most Python code and be able to understand what it does. With perl, I have to look up so much. - Why is there a `1;` on a single line in the middle of this file? - What is `$_`? - 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.…
The only reason AWK needs a BEGIN is due to it's implied data loop. As far as I know perl has an explicit data loop and as such needs no BEGIN.
Oh god, perl has an implied data loop mode doesn't it. Sigh, now I am reading perl manpages to find out.
Update: of course it does, -n or -p
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.
That and Perl giving me a reason to do safe programming in UNIX with a managed language that exposed all the UNIX API surface, and only switching back into C when I actually needed some additional perf, or low level stuff not fully exposed in Perl.
Then again, I am also a fanboi of Haskell, C++, Scala, Idris and similar "wizard" languages.
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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.
Or doing a plain set of scripts into a repo, instead of endless arguments how fit a module implemenents the onion and hexagonal architectures, clean code, or whatever is the trend in this year's architecture conferences.
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.
Humans are tribal, and HR only hires for specific bullet points, thus everyone wants to assert they are on the right tribe when they need to go job hunting.