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Perl's decline was cultural

beatworm.co.uk

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Re: Perl's decline was cultural

#341

Post by forgotpwd16 »

OptionOfT wrote: post #174
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 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…

>I'm sure those things make sense when all you write is Bash

Not really. Bash is known to be incoherent (due to legacy). You eventually getting accustomed to its quirks but they still remain absurd and may unexpectedly bite you someday. Perl code can, and perhaps will (it's humorously referred to as a write-only language afterall), get hard to read but at least is more robust.

Re: Perl's decline was cultural

#343

Post by forgotpwd16 »

IshKebab wrote: post #12

Nah Perl just wasn't a very good language. Not every language is equally good.

Neither is Ruby that has also similarly disappeared and article praised it? Or Lisp? On the opposite end, C, PHP, JS that are omni-present are good languages? Sometimes meritocracy and success don't align.

Re: Perl's decline was cultural

#344

Post by dash2 »

I dunno, I interacted with perl about 2000-2003 in a small way, it always seemed pretty friendly and welcoming, I loved perlmonks and remember it happily.

I'm a bit sceptical about this:

> (Pause a second and ask yourself about the sort of social culture that both allows this kind of behaviour at public events, and then chooses to embrace it as a key piece of cultural lore)

Is it really so terrible that someone throws a coffee cup or two at a wall to make a point? Sounds a bit pearl-clutching.

Re: Perl's decline was cultural

#345

Post by znpy »

pjmlp wrote: post #319
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.

As somone that switches between both roles, when doing DevOps (aka sysadmin in 21st century) even though there is more stress regarding dealing with infrastructure, there is a certain peace of mind being away from Scrum, Jira, milestones, and other stuff, versus plain shell scripts, sed, awk, grep and xargs, VMs up and down. Or doing a plain set of scripts into a repo, instead of endless arguments how fit a module im…

As another “devops-y” guy (I’m essentially a sysadmin, but i accept whatever job title is trending right now) i agree on everything. It’s nice to see (from a distance) all the bs developers have to endure on a daily basis knowing it doesn’t affect me much.

Also… a lot of that complexity is essentially self-inflicted.

I must say however: “devops” is completely different from what old-school system administration used to be.

Re: Perl's decline was cultural

#346

Post by artyom »

Perl was aimed at intelligent people that considered obfuscated code challenges a sport and had a tendency for masochism.

Its main achievement is being there first, before everyone else, to run server-side code in a scripting/interpreted language.

The rest wasn't neither cultural nor technical. From a purely business perspective, having to fight against an idiosyncratic tool half the time doesn't really make much sense.

Re: Perl's decline was cultural

#347

Post by signal11 »

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”.

I agree. Perl made sense as a “step up” in the world of *sh and awk.

Also the culture wasn’t hostile to me as a newcomer. The Perl books I read encouraged not writing overly terse, cryptic code, and I got helpful answers via mailing lists.

I still use Perl sometimes if my command pipeline gets too complicated.

Re: Perl's decline was cultural

#348

Post by amiga386 »

asus386 wrote: post #314
amiga386 wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Well isn't that nice. The boxes I care most about are 32 bit. The perl I use is 5.0 circa 2008. May you amiga386, or anyone else, thank you in advance, may be able to tell me what do I need to upgrade to perl 5.8? Is it only perl 5.8 and whatever is the contemporaneous gcc? Will the rest of my Suse 11.1 circa 2008, crunch? May I have two gcc's on the same box/distro version, and give the path to the later one when I…

suse 11.1 includes perl 5.10: https://ftp5.gwdg.de/pub/opensuse/discontinued/distribution/...

perl 5.8 was released in 2002. perl 5.000 (there is no perl 5.0) was released in 1994. I have difficulty accepting you have perl "5.0" installed.

Re: Perl's decline was cultural

#349

Post by [deleted] »

artyom wrote: post #346

Perl was aimed at intelligent people that considered obfuscated code challenges a sport and had a tendency for masochism. Its main achievement is being there first, before everyone else, to run server-side code in a scripting/interpreted language. The rest wasn't neither cultural nor technical. From a purely business perspective, having to fight against an idiosyncratic tool half the time doesn't really make much sen…

[deleted]

Re: Perl's decline was cultural

#350

Post by crote »

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.…

> BEGIN? Take 60 seconds to read what it means.

Yes, that's exactly the problem: it's additional mental load you have to read up on.

Have 60 of those small oddities in a file, and suddenly you're spending an hour dealing with Perl quirks rather than actually debugging that obscure script a retired coworker wrote a decade ago. A 5-minute fix turned into a 65-minute fix, solely because of Perl.

Most programming languages use more-or-less the same constructs, and the few per-language oddities are usually fairly obvious from context. In practice this means someone familiar with any programming language will to a certain extent be able to read, debug, and patch small issues in code written in any other programming language. Perl's obscure and dense syntax makes this virtually impossible. Give a buggy Python script to a developer who daily-drives Javascript and they can probably fix it. Give a buggy Perl script to that same Javascript developer, and they probably have absolutely no clue what's going on.

In practice this turns Perl into technical debt. It has very few natural niches where it is genuinely the best, so experienced Perl developers are quite rare to have around. Any script written in Perl will most likely have to be read by someone who isn't an experienced Perl developer - which is significantly harder than a script written in just about any other language. The result is that any Perl scripts you have lying around are basically a grenade waiting to go off: they can't be maintained, so they should probably be replaced.

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