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Perl's decline was cultural

beatworm.co.uk

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Re: Perl's decline was cultural

#331

Post by inkyoto »

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.

67 and 41 are the TikTok / Gen Z speech.

67 stands for «whatever», «I don't care», or, cyclically, 67!

41 is an expression of shock or disbelief – «that's wild», «no way» and stuff like that.

Re: Perl's decline was cultural

#332

Post by padjo »

bpbp-mango wrote: post #295

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 lear…

I had the exact same experience. The Perl I encountered early in my career seemed hard to understand in way other languages weren’t. I also didn’t feel I made progress quickly trying to learn it, every time I thought I had my feet under me I’d encounter a new sigil or a new pattern and be back to having no idea what the code was doing.

Re: Perl's decline was cultural

#333

Post by 59nadir »

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…

> 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.

Perl 5 is to me a classic scripting language (as opposed to an actual programming language), for both good and bad. I've always viewed Perl scripts with exactly that perspective and I find them fine/good. In contrast, I find Python to be a mediocre scripting language, an okay-ish programming language from a syntax perspective and a bottom-5 programming language in pretty much every other regard.

Re: Perl's decline was cultural

#334

Post by colinstrickland »

kamaal wrote: post #273
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…

>>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. Those days were different. You could say what people are doing in months to years today, in many ways people back then were doing in days to weeks. Pace and ambition of shipping has not only faded, that very culture is non existent. You don't see people building the next…

> Pace and ambition of shipping has not only faded, that very culture is non existent. You don't see people building the next Facebook or Amazon these days, do you?

Do you not? The pace of anthropic/Claude tool development is pretty bonkers, AI hype reminds me of the 90s a lot.

Re: Perl's decline was cultural

#335

Post by petepete »

mschuster91 wrote: post #51

I don't get why Ruby is mentioned before PHP. The only Ruby thing I've ever come across is GitLab, and not with positive associations either - up until maybe 3, 4 years ago particularly Sidekiq was a constant point of utter pain.

I suspect it's because Ruby's ability to deal with strings is so heavily influenced by Perl.

When I first started using Ruby after years of Perl, it felt familiar but everything was just more... sensible.

Re: Perl's decline was cultural

#336

Post by zahlman »

never_inline wrote: post #219
zahlman wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> By comparison, Python can barely go one version without both introducing new things and removing old things from the language Overwhelmingly, what gets removed is from the standard library, and it's extremely old stuff. As recently as 3.11 you could use `distutils` (the predecessor to Setuptools). And in 3.12 you could still use `pipes` (a predecessor to `subprocess` that nobody ever talked about even when `subproc…

asyncio.get_event_loop ?

I seem to have messed up my italics. The emphasis was supposed to be on "from the interpreter". asyncio.get_event_loop is a standard library function.

Re: Perl's decline was cultural

#338

Post by WesolyKubeczek »

JackSlateur wrote: post #175
superkuh wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Write-only perhaps, but with perl you only have to write it once and it'll run forever, anywhere . No breaking on updates, no containers, no special version of Perl just for $application, just the system perl. Because of this, in practice, the amount of system administration mantainence and care needed for perl programs is far, far less than other languages like python where you actually do have to go in and re-write…

Aren't perl modules locked to the exact version they were compiled in ? I've met many time some error "haha nope, wrong version, perl 5.31.7 required"

Pure perl modules are not, unless they use syntactic features that first appear in the newer versions.

Modules with C extensions have to be recompiled with libperl they run against, as much as CPython extensions link to a particular libpython, and guess Ruby is the same. But they, with very few exceptions, will recompile and run fine. XS is cryptic but its backwards compatibility story is good.

Re: Perl's decline was cultural

#339

Post by finaard »

pasc1878 wrote: post #326
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…

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…

> 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.

That's funny. I avoid python whenever possible, but one of the things I hate the most is how it is doing regex. I find the way it works in perl (both for search/replace and in conditionals) just intuitive.

Re: Perl's decline was cultural

#340

Post by colinstrickland »

ojosilva wrote: post #221
dehrmann wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> bolted on, awkward params passing Shell had to do this because of shell reasons, like how you need spaces where you shouldn't. Perl post-dated C by over a decade, so there was no reason for goofy argument unpacking.

Yes there was a reason as Perl took inspiration from Lisp - everything is a list- and everyone knows how quick C's variadic arguments get nasty. So @_ was a response to that issue, given Perl was about being dynamic and not typed and there were no IDEs or linters that would type-check and refactor code based on function signatures. JS had the same issue forever and finally implemented a rest/spread operator in ES6. P…

Although Perl auto flattens lists by default, which isn't particularly lisp like.
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