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Perl's decline was cultural

beatworm.co.uk

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Re: Perl's decline was cultural

#351

Post by QuadmasterXLII »

skydhash wrote: post #226
skywhopper wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There’s nothing that can replace bash for what it does. People have been trying for decades. You’ll be happier if you accept that bash can and will happily coexist with anything and everything else, which is exactly why it will never go away.

CLI usage revolves around text and bash is a meta layer above that. Given curl, jq, and awk, you can create a quick MVP client for almost any api. Doing the same in Python and Go is much more involved.

Throw in nc and a while loop, and you can have a server too!

Re: Perl's decline was cultural

#352

Post by leoc »

I'm not sure about the Perl-specific claims here, but it is amusing how pervasive "on one or more occasions, I got a dopamine release after managing to struggle through the horror and misery of X: now I'm convinced that X is Good, Actually" seems to be in computing.

Re: Perl's decline was cultural

#353

Post by xyzwave »

dana321 wrote: post #206

I remember the first time a saw Perl, it looked like some kind of alien language from outer space, all the symbols it used looked insane. But once you get it, its pretty intuitive to use. The worst part about it was the syntax for object oriented programming, which in raku (perl 6) is a lot better and intuitive. Raku has some great ideas like grammars, but has a lot of new magic symbology and lost what i thought was…

“Warning: Smartmatch is experimental at foobar.pl line 42.”

If only I had a dollar for every time I’ve seen this message.

Re: Perl's decline was cultural

#354

Post by zweifuss »

Ferret7446 wrote: post #261
lamontcg wrote: post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

I don't think "Pythonista" was a thing in the 2000s. Python is very old and only became more of a "fad" relatively recently.

I can remember perl vs python flame wars ca. 2002.

Also, the early 2010s are not that recent: https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=Pythonista%2Cp...

Re: Perl's decline was cultural

#355

Post by zzzeek »

> I wrote a lot of Perl in the mid 90s and subsequently worked on some of the most trafficked sites on the web in mod_perl in the early 2000s, so I have some thoughts.

Hey me too exactly! I wrote the CMS for mlb.com in 2003 entirely in mod_perl.

This post is indeed a little walk down memory lane of the Perliness of the 1990s. I spent most of the 1990s enforcing everyone in my team (yes, by 1998 they made me in charge, totally inappropriately) use Perl on awkward environments like Windows NT because giving in to horrendous systems like Active Server Pages or...shudder...Cold Fusion represented the heat death of the profession. Microsoft was determined to to murder the whole "RTFM / TMTOWTDI" culture and replace it with their own brand of corporate mediocrity (remember, there was no XBox at this time. Github? no, source control was in Visual Source Safe [narrator: your source code was, in fact, not very safe!]. MSFT was 1000% uncool and evil).

But ultimately mod_perl's decline was technical! It's syntax, organization and operation were enough to get us through the 90's but were at the same time doing violence to one's cognitive facilities. Python came along and fixed everything that was wrong with Perl. I started in Python porting things from Perl, like HTML::Mason, because I was not yet enlightened enough. But I got there eventually.

Re: Perl's decline was cultural

#357

Post by nmz »

leoc wrote: post #352

I'm not sure about the Perl-specific claims here, but it is amusing how pervasive "on one or more occasions, I got a dopamine release after managing to struggle through the horror and misery of X: now I'm convinced that X is Good, Actually" seems to be in computing.

But isn't this everything? All of computing is a struggle for me at least, all followed with confusion and "Why did they make this, this way?"

Re: Perl's decline was cultural

#358

Post by IshKebab »

nmz wrote: post #357
leoc wrote: post #352

I'm not sure about the Perl-specific claims here, but it is amusing how pervasive "on one or more occasions, I got a dopamine release after managing to struggle through the horror and misery of X: now I'm convinced that X is Good, Actually" seems to be in computing.

But isn't this everything? All of computing is a struggle for me at least, all followed with confusion and "Why did they make this, this way?"

But is it all equally a struggle? Some things are definitely more of a struggle than others. Remember xfree86config? We used to have to manually configure our screen resolution in a shitty text file. I even remembered that you had to specifically add a line to tell it you had a 3 button mouse. This was in the late 90s, maybe early 00s. Way after it was sane to have to do that.

And I specifically remember when they fixed it there really were some people who pushed back against the change. Kind of unbelievable but it's true. I guess psychologically they felt that it was unfair that they had to struggle and future people wouldn't have to. But they couldn't just say that so they came up with nonsense technical objections.

Re: Perl's decline was cultural

#359

Post by erpellan »

chamomeal wrote: post #330
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”.

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 langu…

You might also enjoy Janet https://janet-lang.org/

Re: Perl's decline was cultural

#360

Post by stack_framer »

array_key_first wrote: post #248
stack_framer wrote: post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I think it's our civic duty to crusade for those causes Why crusade using the resources of a technical community though? Surely it alienates the people who don't happen to align with the causes important to you. There are myriad ways to perform your civic duty in your city. You could knock doors and encourage people to vote, for example. Why do it through a technical community?

There is zero way you don't alienate anyone. Ask women software engineers if they ever feel alienated. That's the reason why some communities like the python community do outreach for minorities in tech. I'm a white man, and I have never felt "alienated" in so-called progressive spaces.

> outreach for minorities in tech

Why is there no outreach to other minorities in tech, like the Amish, for example? They are certainly more underrepresented than women in the python community.

Or how about male ballet dancers? Why isn't the python community allocating some of its resources to helping them feel seen and included?

I'm giving ridiculous examples because the whole premise is ridiculous. And my general question remains: Why devote the resources of a tech community toward one social issue/group or another? There are plenty of other outlets more suitable for doing our civic duty.

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