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Why Perl Didn't Win

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Re: Why Perl Didn't Win

#41

Post by riffraff »

Blackthorn wrote: post #35
lacker wrote: post #29

If there was no Ruby, I suspect Perl would still be popular. At one point the scripting language holy wars were "Perl vs Python". That turned into "Ruby vs Python". Similar philosophy, lots of better stuff in Ruby.

Perl was dead long before Ruby on Rails was a big thing (Ruby itself was effectively moribund until Rails).

> Ruby itself was effectively moribund until Rails

I think you might mean "unknown" rather than "moribund", but just in case: no it wasn't, it was quite successful, RAA wasn't CPAN but was quite rich, there were steady improvements to the language and the community outside japan was growing (i.e. most of the european ruby user groups started before ruby on rails). It was just growing slowly, rather than skyrocketing.

Re: Why Perl Didn't Win

#42

Post by kijin »

McGlockenshire wrote: post #31
kijin wrote: post #23

I don't think Perl will ever recover from the Perl 6 fiasco, and I'm worried for Python for the same reason. PHP, on the other hand, handled the PHP 6 "failure" relatively gracefully. There was a bit of stagnation in the days of PHP 5.2 when the devs devoted too much energy to PHP 6 and not enough on improving the current version. But soon, PHP 6 was put on hold and some of its better parts began to be ported to PHP…

> Everyone knows that any script that works in PHP 5.6 will probably work just fine in 7.0 This is no longer strictly true. On Friday, the "let's remove all the deprecated stuff" RFC was passed. Anything that causes an E_DEPRECATED in 5.6 will now be a fatal in 7. For example, ext/ereg and ext/mysql are no longer included, and have been shipped off to PECL. Shouldn't be a problem for anyone that doesn't compile their…

You're right, any code that runs without errors in 5.6 will probably run fine in 7.0.

And that's exactly how deprecation is supposed to work! No massive changes, only incremental changes, and even those incremental changes come with at least a couple of years of grace period.

Re: Why Perl Didn't Win

#43

Post by malandrew »

frik wrote: post #36
aytekin wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Big rewrites = death

It seems so. * Perl 6: almost everyone is on Perl 5, or switched to another language * Python 3: many libraries and devs will stick with Python 2, several devs switched to Go * PHP 6: unicode rewrite never released, new features backported to 5.3+, several books were published in advance with PHP 6 in the title, next release will be named PHP 7 to avoid confusion * Lua 5.2+: half of the community stuck with 5.1 as su…

io.js has one major advantage over your other examples: it is tracking the same javascript that browsers are running.

When every major browser is moving in the same direction with a language, any server-side counterpart is best served moving in the same direction.

Without browsers, io.js would have likely ended up in the same place as all the examples above.

Re: Why Perl Didn't Win

#44

Post by mateuszf »

frik wrote: post #36
aytekin wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Big rewrites = death

It seems so. * Perl 6: almost everyone is on Perl 5, or switched to another language * Python 3: many libraries and devs will stick with Python 2, several devs switched to Go * PHP 6: unicode rewrite never released, new features backported to 5.3+, several books were published in advance with PHP 6 in the title, next release will be named PHP 7 to avoid confusion * Lua 5.2+: half of the community stuck with 5.1 as su…

* Angular.js - Don't want to be preaching - but it looks like version 2 will be die in the same way.

Re: Why Perl Didn't Win

#45

Post by perlgeek »

beat wrote: post #20

You know what rocked? Perl 4. I started on Perl 4 in the mid-1990s. It was fantastic! I started replacing thousand-line C programs with hundred-line Perl programs that were more robust and worked better, and replacing shell scripts made of awkward sed/awk pipelines with neat, tight Perl. Arrays and hashes as first class data structures? Marvelous! Then Perl 5 ruined it all. The ridiculous, bloated "object oriented" s…

> And Perl 6? Fourteen years and nothing to show for it

... except a nearly feature-complete [1] compiler [2] and an impressive test suite [3]

[1] http://perl6.org/compilers/features [2] http://rakudo.org/ [3] https://github.com/perl6/roast/

> and it'll have to be backwards compatible to all the things violently wrong with Perl 5

Not at all. The whole point about Perl 6 is that it breaks backwards compatibility to fix the things that are wrong with Perl 5.

Re: Why Perl Didn't Win

#46

Post by lmm »

BuckRogers wrote: post #12
pyre wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While you may end up being right, Perl6 is a much larger departure from Perl5 (than Python3 is from Python2). Can one even use CPAN with Perl6? Is it even possible to convert existing Perl5 CPAN packages to support both versions at the same time (like all of the PyPI packages that support both Python2 and Python3)?

It is a different departure, and it isn't a 1:1 comparison. That's true. But Python3 is an obvious failure and no one is admitting it, yet. I've seen claims from the core dev team about how Python3 is doing well because it has more downloads from Python.org, which is so stupid I won't even address it. A comparison of PyPI download statistics says it all. Python3 migration had many ridiculous ways of pushing people to…

All the talk has felt like giving up right before the finish line to me; it seems like migration was chugging along and then there was this huge backlash just before every distro made 3 the default, which would basically have been mission accomplished. Arch and to a certain extent gentoo were already there. And then suddenly, after quietly going along with it for 5+ years, everyone wanted to throw their toys out of the pram rather than do a little bit more. It's enough to make one think of conspiracies.

As far as I can see, python 3 is there now; it's the default on my servers, all the libraries support it, and it's a nicer language to program in. And just as that became true, everyone started losing their minds.

Re: Why Perl Didn't Win

#47

Post by silvestrov »

riffraff wrote: post #40
silvestrov wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The perl developers greatly underestimated the importance of syntactic sugar and familiarity. (Java was helped a lot by looking like C). PHP was much more friendly towards new programmers than Perl 5, it was so much easier to make simple web pages. So it took over. It didn't matter that Perl 5 was more advanced. (oh, you uploaded module to same dir and didn't remember to add something to @INC)

> The perl developers greatly underestimated the importance of syntactic sugar and familiarity. I don't think that's the case. The problem is that the generation of tools that have stuff in common with perl (awk, sed, shell) are completely unfamiliar to programmers which started programming in the last 15 years, compared to those that started 30 years ago.

Look at how much boilerplate code you need in Perl 5 to create a class versus C++/Java's simple class MyClass { }

You need to assign to a variable named @ISA, you need to return 1; at the bottom of the file. And 'public' members have to be listed in the EXPORT variable.

It is really funny that Perl 5 OO need more boilerplate code than Java!

Re: Why Perl Didn't Win

#48

Post by ars »

frik wrote: post #36
aytekin wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Big rewrites = death

It seems so. * Perl 6: almost everyone is on Perl 5, or switched to another language * Python 3: many libraries and devs will stick with Python 2, several devs switched to Go * PHP 6: unicode rewrite never released, new features backported to 5.3+, several books were published in advance with PHP 6 in the title, next release will be named PHP 7 to avoid confusion * Lua 5.2+: half of the community stuck with 5.1 as su…

You can add IPv6 to that list.

Re: Why Perl Didn't Win

#49

Post by pjmlp »

nemo wrote: post #21
sulam wrote: post #14

Speaking as someone who lived through this period during the formative years of my programming career, the author has completely missed the most influential language of the time and, in my mind at least, the number reason why Perl lost. Yes, I'm talking about Java. It's easy to hate now, but Java back then replaced all the server-side Perl programming that I did in the space of about 3 years, from 1994 where CGI prog…

There were two sides - PHP was eating a ton of share from Perl for people and businesses who just wanted to get some simple web thing going. Sun pulled out the "Java is Enterprise" card early and successfully marketed it as being a professional scalable web programming solution for enterprise class applications with a few targeted buzzwords for whatever market segment they were going for. Perl seemed like it was alwa…

> In that space Ruby/Python are competing, but there's still plenty of sysadmins who use Perl since it works.

I don't know how it looks now, but if you login into the likes of HP-UX, Aix, Solaris and so on, usually only Perl is available.

This is what made me learn Perl, back when I was mostly into Python (.com days).

Re: Why Perl Didn't Win

#50

Post by bad_user »

sulam wrote: post #14

Speaking as someone who lived through this period during the formative years of my programming career, the author has completely missed the most influential language of the time and, in my mind at least, the number reason why Perl lost. Yes, I'm talking about Java. It's easy to hate now, but Java back then replaced all the server-side Perl programming that I did in the space of about 3 years, from 1994 where CGI prog…

I've dabbled in the source-code of many projects. And personally I've never seen projects more incomprehensible than some of the ones I've seen built with Java. Of course, I've also seen well written Java code, however Java projects tend to be massively over-engineered and tasteless. Its popularity doesn't help either, the signal to noise ratio in the pool of Java developers being awful.

On people picking up Go over other options, well that's because people never learn and we are bound to propel shitty languages ad-nauseam.

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