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Perl's decline was cultural

beatworm.co.uk

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Re: Perl's decline was cultural

#321

Post by relistan »

Way back, Perl got off the ground really because, in contrast to the C compilers of the era, code written on one Unix ran on the others, usually unmodified. In my first jobs, where we had heterogeneous mixes of commercial Unixes, this was unbeatable. It also wrote like higher level shell, which made it easy to learn for systems people, who really were the only ones that cared about running things on multiple platforms most of the time anyway.

As things became more homogeneous, and furthermore as other languages also could do that “one weird trick” of cross platform support, the shortcomings of both Perl and its community came to the fore.

Re: Perl's decline was cultural

#322

Post by zaphirplane »

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.

First time I read something like that about Perl. Is this personal experience during the Perl peak period or extrapolation from phrases

Re: Perl's decline was cultural

#323

Post by MayeulC »

pavel_lishin wrote: post #167
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”.

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!"

At least you have bash scripts. Most of my coworkers write tcsh scripts :|

(And yes, I have been pushing for bash or posix sh).

Re: Perl's decline was cultural

#324

Post by antonvs »

edoceo wrote: post #229
GPerson wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did you come up with that? If so, bravo!

6-7? No, my kid says it about a thousand time a day. Then, for some unknown reason they follow it with 41! WTF! I've shouted 42! many times and have tried to inform the child of the significant cultural and scientific importance of 42. Which, IIRC, factors to 2,3,7.

> 41!

That’s a very big number!

Re: Perl's decline was cultural

#325

Post by tails4e »

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 liked perl, it was the first language I used daily as a HW engineer. When I moved to python more recently what I missed the most was how easy it was to do a one liner if with regex capturing. That couldn't be done in python for a long time. I think the walrus operator helps, but it's still not quite as concise, but it's closer

Re: Perl's decline was cultural

#326

Post by pasc1878 »

pavel_lishin wrote: post #68
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'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…

This is it. I wrote largish systems in perl using its OO things and that was good.

The one thing I could never ever get was using a regex - not the regex itself but the line to actually use it.

Python was so much easier as it was simple define the regex and then use a function on it. I suppose I should hjave spent a few days to write some wrapper in perl - doing those few days would have saved me time overall.

As for one liners I was originally an APL programmer so not a problem. But it is just bad style to write a one liner much better to write it in a maintainable form and split up the operations so they can be seen.

Nowadays I ddon't use lambdas if possible - much better to have a named function you can refer to.

Re: Perl's decline was cultural

#327

Post by thaumasiotes »

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.…

> 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).

OK, I had never heard of the syntax, but in its own defense it does exactly what you'd guess, the same thing it does after an "if".

These are equivalent statements:

    preloop:
      if condition:
        do_more_stuff()
        goto preloop

    while condition:
      do_more_stuff()
and these are also equivalent:

    preloop:
      if condition:
        do_more_stuff()
        goto preloop
      else:
        wrap_it_ip()

    while condition:
      do_more_stuff()
    else:
      wrap_it_up()

Re: Perl's decline was cultural

#328

Post by colinstrickland »

nucleogenesis wrote: post #138

The number of blogs posted on here by people who can’t be arsed to make their writing legible on mobile blows my mind. Did everybody just skip the section of their CSS journey that covered media queries or what? I enjoyed the article but it was a nightmare to read on my phone’s browser

(Author) Sorry you had a poor experience, yes my blog "engine" is a hacked together POS that barely works, with hand written CSS, that was mostly built before the mobile first era, I have just tweaked it to work somewhat on portrait phone screens, but it's really not a very good website. I do try to generate fairly plain semantic HTML so the pages should work pretty well with "reader mode" or user stylesheets if you have access to that. That's probably the optimal experience.

Re: Perl's decline was cultural

#329

Post by adamors »

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.

You are talking about misleading type hints, not optional ones. Optional means they don’t have to be added. Wrong typehints are so much worse than missing ones.

Re: Perl's decline was cultural

#330

Post by chamomeal »

phil21 wrote: post #126
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’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”.

If you’re in the market for fun hackable tool that sits between “bash script” and “real developer” I highly recommend checking out babashka.

It lets you write shell scripts with clojure. Babashka itself is a single executable, so no JVM bulk or startup time. And the built-in libs include all sorts of nifty utilities. Parsers, servers, excellent async stuff (but IMO clojure might have the best async story of any language out there so I’m biased), http stuff. All macro-able and REPL-able and everything. It’s a scripting dream, and when it’s time to be an adult, you can throw it on the JVM too!

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