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Perl's decline was cultural

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Re: Perl's decline was cultural

#371

Post by smt88 »

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?"

I didn't have this experience when I first learned C#. Everything just kind of worked the way I expected it to. There are sharp edges, but far fewer than expected and always for an actual reason.

Re: Perl's decline was cultural

#372

Post by petit_robert »

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…

>This was one of the big reasons, most of these enterprise coders wanted Perl gone

I see some people disagree with you, but reading this reminds me of this anecdote :

My brother has a very high IQ score, but poor social skills. He once found employment in one of the very early companies developing websites in our area.

There was a process requiring to manually check hundreds of links for validity, which took large amounts of time to do (as in several developper hours weekly), and was error prone at that. The details are fuzzy as this happened some 30 years ago or so, but essentially he found a logical way to do the thing without error in 15 minutes.

The other developers went on a rampage to dismiss the solution, for fear of looking like idiots, and even though the solution was provable, my bro go fired, and went on to become a mechanic. What a shame though.

So, your comment rang a bell.

Also : I make a living developing and maintaining a handful of custom made SaaS for small clients on a LAMP stack (Linux Apache Mod_perl Postgresql). Very thrifty.

Little money, but loads of fun as far as I'm concerned

Re: Perl's decline was cultural

#373

Post by derbOac »

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.

Python for awhile had its own cultural issues. I guess, coming from more of a C and lisp background, the stuff you're mentioning seemed playful and fun to me and I didn't get the sense anyone expected to write performance critical code in it anyway.

Python forums in contrast to me included neverending justifications for why whitespace and indent formatting was critical and this kind of odd (to me) imperfect type system implementation, like the whole thing was some toy language pretending to be more than it was (in the sense that if you wanted something more complete in language or performance you'd go elsewhere).

Perl just seemed to know its place and not take itself too seriously.

Things changed though. I haven't touched Perl in years but use Python all the time. I never understood why Python got the traction it did given its performance limitations compared to some other languages (except as part of a broader trend for people to use whatever language they leaned in introductory comp sci) but I do think I understand why people stopped learning Perl.

Re: Perl's decline was cultural

#374

Post by joeiq »

Spot on: the toxic culture around the language was a nail in its coffin.

A classmate who introduced me to Linux in the early 2000’s was a Perl enthusiast who completely embodied the RTFM mindset. If someone didn’t already know something they were mocked. We ceased to be friends after a number of these interactions.

Re: Perl's decline was cultural

#375

Post by petit_robert »

mr_toad wrote: post #213
ErikCorry wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The syntax problems are just surface. There are some real problems underneath: Poor performance of the single implementation. A single implementation. Leaky ref counted GC, but 'luckily' the syntax for references is so clunky that nobody does anything complicated enough that it really matters. Bolted on object oriented features that never got the love they needed at a time when oo languages were sweeping the world. M…

> 'luckily' the syntax for references is so clunky that nobody does anything complicated enough that it really matters. That made me laugh. Unlike actually working with Perl references, which made me want to cry.

Strange, for me it's the opposite.

Just yesterday, I moved some 100 lines of code using a hash quite a few times from the main module to a function using a reference to the hash.

if %args is the hash holding the data, '$args{key}' tells me the value of 'key' in the main module.

a reference to the hash passed to the function is noted like so : '$args = \%args';$args->{key} tells me value of 'key'

All I had to do to adapt the code was to replace '$args{' with '$args->{', done by the time I typed the replace command in my editor.

Funny that it just makes sense to me, must be something with the brain's wiring.

Re: Perl's decline was cultural

#376

Post by klipt »

dxdm wrote: post #364
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”.

It's been a while, but I found for me personally, that Perl flows while writing it, but stops flowing when reading the same code after some time has passed. It was good for getting things done once, but no fun to maintain and adapt - at least the way I was using it decades ago. I moved from Perl to Python and never looked back.

LUKE: Is Perl better than Python?

YODA: No... no... no. Quicker, easier, more seductive.

LUKE: But how will I know why Python is better than Perl?

YODA: You will know. When your code you try to read six months from now.

https://wiki.python.org/moin/PythonCdFun

Re: Perl's decline was cultural

#377

Post by tmtvl »

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…

Perl was developed in 1987, the first Common Lisp standard was released in 1984, 3 years earlier. Common Lisp allows arguments like so:

  (defun frobnicate (foo &key (bar (Vector 1 2 3)) (baz 'quux))
    (declare (type Foo foo)
             (type (Vector Integer) bar)
             (type Symbol baz))
    ...)
Not only normal arguments like we get in C or Pascal, but there's keyword arguments, you can have optional arguments, and a rest argument, which is most like Perl's @_. And that's not even getting into destructuring lambda lists which are available for macros or typed lambda lists for methods.

Re: Perl's decline was cultural

#378

Post by nottorp »

hylaride wrote: post #366
nottorp wrote: post #356

I always thought Perl faded because it's write only and more readable alternatives showed up. Why did it have to take over the world anyway?

> Why did it have to take over the world anyway? Because it was there, mostly. In a UNIX world where text was everything, it was well suited to quick and dirty solutions (that then morphed into long-term technical debt). Most alternatives at the time were not there by default as they either were commercial or otherwise didn't have any ecosystem to expand it's utility (like CPAN - without it Perl would likely be like…

Well that's not what I meant. Does everything has to have taking over the world as a goal? Perl still exists, I guess it's updated, why isn't that enough?

Re: Perl's decline was cultural

#379

Post by PaulRobinson »

Of course it was cultural. This article covers it all in more detail, but I was coding a lot in this period of Perl's decline, and in hindsight it was all so obvious.

I wrote a lot of Perl 3 and Perl 4 to date my experience.

Rails was designed to be a luxury hand-holding experience using a language that was intended - as a design goal - to make programming fun. There was even for a while in the late 2000s the culture of _why and MINSWAN.

PHP was fast, easy, forgiving. It also led to such awful code that several companies banned it. I think nearly all of us who got to deploy code with nothing more than FTP miss that. Of course today it runs more of the web than any other language.

Perl on the other hand wasn't interested in any of that, so many people just left because they were pulled by better ecosystems that took the web seriously, or pushed by a culture that believed the priesthood was real.

For me, Rails and Ruby were genuinely joyful discoveries after spending a couple of years wrestling J2EE and .NET apps in the ~2002-2005 era, and the Perl community felt crusty and unwelcome and immature by comparison.

Today I'm no fan of come of the politics of people being some popular Ruby frameworks cough, but I enjoy Ruby and I'm enjoying my dive back into systems programming via re-learning C and taking a long look at Zig. I'm not sure I'll ever write "production" Perl again.

Re: Perl's decline was cultural

#380

Post by zenlot »

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…

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