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Perl's decline was cultural

beatworm.co.uk

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Re: Perl's decline was cultural

#41

Post by zahlman »

999900000999 wrote: post #3

Python is mentioned and I think the key reason it's continued to grow while Perl declined, is a vastly more welcoming culture. Python says you know nothing, but want to automate a small task. The community will help you. More so than any other language. Then again, Python 2 and Python 3 are two different languages. Very few projects are willing to have such a massive migration.

"Willing" is an interesting word choice. There was quite a bit of resistance in the Python world despite the clear benefits. (2.x really could not be fixed, because the semantics were fundamentally broken in many places.)

Re: Perl's decline was cultural

#42

Post by simonw »

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.

This made me smile given Python's love of Monty Python references - the cheese shop etc.

Re: Perl's decline was cultural

#44

Post by jordanb »

symbogra wrote: post #21
MangoToupe wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Python 3 almost killed Python. People were being crybabies; the critics were extremely vocal and few. Python 3 improved the language in every way and the tooling to upgrade remains unmatched.

Python 3 was a disaster and enterprises were still undertaking pointless 2->3 upgrade projects 10 years later

It was annoying but if it hadn't happened Python would still be struggling with basic things like Unicode.

Organizations struggled with it but they struggle with basically every breaking change. I was on the tooling team that helped an organization handle the transition of about 5 million lines of data science code from python 2.7 to 3.2. We also had to handle other breaking changes like airflow upgrades, spark 2->3, intel->amd->graviton.

At that scale all those changes are a big deal. Heck even the pickle protocol change in Python 3.8 was a big deal for us. I wouldn't characterize the python 2->3 transition as a significantly bigger deal than some of the others. In many ways it was easier because so much hay was made about it there was a lot of knowledge and tooling.

Re: Perl's decline was cultural

#45

Post by buescher »

I never really warmed to perl in its era but perl dbi was kind of perfect in its way. If you needed what it could do, it got very intuitive very fast, and was pretty terse. Both of which were supposedly the appeal of perl.

Re: Perl's decline was cultural

#46

Post by lysace »

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.

Perl is a sysadmin language. There's "always" been this tension between sysadmins and developers.

In my mind (developer back then) I'd amateur-psychoanalyze all of that nonsense as some kind of inferiority complex meant to preserve the self image. Needless complexity can be a feature!

And now we are all developers!

Re: Perl's decline was cultural

#47

Post by zihotki »

symbogra wrote: post #21
MangoToupe wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Python 3 almost killed Python. People were being crybabies; the critics were extremely vocal and few. Python 3 improved the language in every way and the tooling to upgrade remains unmatched.

Python 3 was a disaster and enterprises were still undertaking pointless 2->3 upgrade projects 10 years later

A month ago I had to fix a small bug in Python 2.6 code in one of internal systems. It won't be ever migrated, no capacity and no value

Re: Perl's decline was cultural

#48

Post by js2 »

Perl died for many reasons. For me, it was a language that was always too tempting to be too clever by half. I'd been using Perl pretty significantly from 1995-2000 (perl4 to perl5) when I was introduced to Python (1.5.2)[^1]. I greatly appreciated its simplicity, zen, batteries included standard lib, and REPL. I found add on packages easier to install than dealing with CPAN. I switched to Python and basically never looked back.

[^1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44790671

Re: Perl's decline was cultural

#50

Post by MrDarcy »

lysace wrote: post #46
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.

Perl is a sysadmin language. There's "always" been this tension between sysadmins and developers. In my mind (developer back then) I'd amateur-psychoanalyze all of that nonsense as some kind of inferiority complex meant to preserve the self image. Needless complexity can be a feature! And now we are all developers!

In the 2000’s Python was also a sysadmin language.

Edit: But I see your point, Google SRE’s around the late 2000’s reached for Python more than Perl.

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