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Perl's decline was cultural

beatworm.co.uk

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Re: Perl's decline was cultural

#421

Post by topspin »

deafpolygon wrote: post #5

Perl6/Raku killed Perl. Python 3 almost killed Python. It's normal. Once a community loses faith, it's hard to stop them from leaving.

"Perl6/Raku killed Perl."

Perl was effectively "dead" before Perl 6 existed. I was there. I bought the books, wrote the code, hung out in #perl and followed the progress. I remember when Perl 6 was announced. I remember barely caring by that time, and I perceived that I was hardly alone. Everyone had moved on by then. At best, Perl 6 was seen as maybe Perl making a "come back."

Java, and (by extension) Windows, killed Perl.

Java promised portability. Java had a workable cross-platform GUI story (Swing). Java had a web story with JSP, Tomcat, Java applets, etc. Java had a plausible embedded and mobile story. Java wasn't wedded to the UNIX model, and at the time, Java's Windows implementation was as least as good as its non-Windows implementations, if not better. Java also had a development budget, a marketing budget, and the explicit blessing of several big tech giants of the time.

In the late 90's and early 2000's, Java just sucked the life out of almost everything else that wasn't a "systems" or legacy big-iron language. Perl was just another casualty of Java. Many of the things that mattered back then either seem silly today or have been solved with things other than Java, but at the time they were very compelling.

Could Perl have been saved? Maybe. The claims that Perl is difficult to learn or "write only" aren't true: Perl isn't the least bit difficult. Nearly every Perl programmer on Earth is self-taught, the documentation is excellent and Google has been able to answer any basic Perl question one might have for decades now. If Perl had somehow bent itself enough to make Windows a first-class platform, it would have helped a lot. If Perl had provided a low friction, batteries-included de facto standard web template and server integration solution, it would have helped a lot as well. If Perl had a serious cross-platform GUI story, that would helped a lot.

To the extent that the Perl "community" was somehow incapable of these things, we can call the death of Perl a phenomena of "culture." I, however, attribute the fall of Perl to the more mundane reason that Perl had no business model and no business advocates.

Re: Perl's decline was cultural

#422

Post by altairprime »

SoftTalker wrote: post #266
creer wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You indeed ran into toxic environments. I don't feel that the common, new perl programmer intake path was anything like that. Not what I ever ran into. Support in forums and such was needlessly short in using RTFM as an answer. People could have pasted a one paragraph pointer to the documentation intake path and that would have helped.

Don't forget many people were still on dial-up and long forum posts were probably discouraged in favor of RTFM or other terse reply.

It was primarily the exhaustion of experts at tireless waves of newbies who hadn’t studied the available materials.

IRC being async if the client is run locally, modem delays made no difference (just as with QWKmail and forum posts). And for remote host IRC, I don’t remember what the IRC line length limit was but at 300bps you could get an entire message and the buffer scroll updates accompanying it in 1 second, which was well-sufficient enough to support peak volume with no relevant latency. And, I can still type a paragraph at clock seconds of input latency and remember where I’m at when backspacing. So, I would definitely not ascribe a desire for brevity as an outcome of modems.

Re: Perl's decline was cultural

#424

Post by altairprime »

writtiewrat wrote: post #244
altairprime wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It does if you restrict flexibility, but one of the critical flaws in Perl culture was the belief in letting everyone evolve in different directions while cooperating. It’s a genuinely charming belief, but it’s also explicitly incompatible with ‘interchangeable parts’ employment, and tends to only work in an environment where every individual is the ‘wizard’ lord of their personal domain over code. Even if you manage…

Some of the reasons why I never bothered with Perl was that I had the perception that it, like Ruby, encouraged mutating and modifying classes on the fly, willy-nilly. And the lack of static typing. Python also did not have static typing (it has some optional typing now or something like it), but my perception was that monkeypatching was not abused as much in Python as it might be in Perl and Ruby. Not that I used Py…

Perk was never much interested in fiat-enforced restrictions. That was considered to be the domain of local policy in a given project or team and not something to declare upon its users. We’ve since determined in programming that restrictions can exceed the value of perfect freedom (cf. Rust, TypeScript vs. C, Perl). But for scenarios where rapid flexibility is key (eg. ops eng, sans sre/k8s/etc) the flexibility is more important than the restrictions. Always have an adjustable wrench alongside your fixed-jaws, just in case.

Re: Perl's decline was cultural

#425

Post by nottorp »

hylaride wrote: post #384
nottorp wrote: post #378

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

> 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? I never got the impression that perl's goal was to take over the world, but it was good at dealing with certain kinds of problems at a time in computing where it mattered, especially for one-offs. The 1980s/1990s was full of many, many different data formats in a time before XML/JSON, often b…

> I never got the impression that perl's goal was to take over the world

Yeah, it's more like the article is implying that should be the goal.

Re: Perl's decline was cultural

#426

Post by em-bee »

jodrellblank wrote: post #399
algernonramone wrote: post #275

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seems somewhat related to Iverson's 1979 Turing Award lecture, "Notation as a Tool of Thought" ( https://www.eecg.utoronto.ca/~jzhu/csc326/readings/iverson.p... )( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25249563 )

Reading the YCombinator link there's a mention of APL and a comment by dTal[1] which includes saying: > " A lot of the mystique of APL is because it's illegible ... nothing more than a DSL for 'numpy-like' code. .. same demo, using Julia and the result is (in my opinion) much more legible: ... let n=sum(map( sum() in Julia is more clear and more readable at a glance than +/ in APL, but the APL version is a combinatio…

this is why i like how operators work in pike:

+ - * / and other operators work not only on numbers but on strings, arrays and other types and all have an intuitive application.

on strings and arrays for example, + is concatenate, / is split, * is join, - is filter (with static values).

Re: Perl's decline was cultural

#427

Post by em-bee »

asa400 wrote: post #191
pavel_lishin wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Was Perl one of your first languages by any chance? I freely admit that I've only been poking at it for a few months; maybe by this time next year, I'll be boggled at the comment I left, like it was written by a different person. > in between “bash script” and “real developer”. One of my coworkers gave me some great perspective by saying, "at least it's not written in Bash!"

> One of my coworkers gave me some great perspective by saying, "at least it's not written in Bash!" I wish bash was the thing that was dying. As an industry, we need to make better choices.

i think this is changing. in recent years, alternative shells that break with bash syntax like fish or elvish and others are gaining in popularity. oils is of particular interest because it has an sh/bash compatible mode and thus provides an upgrade path away from bash.

Re: Perl's decline was cultural

#428

Post by lamontcg »

webstrand wrote: post #311
kamaal wrote: post #276

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>>Perl died because other languages starting having an equivalent to CPAN Last time I checked apart from npm, no other language has anything similar to CPAN.

PyPI doesn't count? (or rust's cargo)

or rubygems

Re: Perl's decline was cultural

#429

Post by tails4e »

rs186 wrote: post #367
tails4e wrote: post #325

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I liked perl, it was the first language I used daily as a HW engineer. When I moved to python more recently what I missed the most was how easy it was to do a one liner if with regex capturing. That couldn't be done in python for a long time. I think the walrus operator helps, but it's still not quite as concise, but it's closer

Good for you, not for anyone else reading the code or yourself 6 months later. Seen too much of that.

My code wasn't written to be hard to decipher, and it wasn't a goal to get everything on one line by any stretch, I just didn't like an if with regext was 2 lines minimum in python, it felt inelegant for a language that is pretty elegant in general

Re: Perl's decline was cultural

#430

Post by chromatic »

topspin wrote: post #421
deafpolygon wrote: post #5

Perl6/Raku killed Perl. Python 3 almost killed Python. It's normal. Once a community loses faith, it's hard to stop them from leaving.

"Perl6/Raku killed Perl." Perl was effectively "dead" before Perl 6 existed. I was there. I bought the books, wrote the code, hung out in #perl and followed the progress. I remember when Perl 6 was announced. I remember barely caring by that time, and I perceived that I was hardly alone. Everyone had moved on by then. At best, Perl 6 was seen as maybe Perl making a "come back." Java, and (by extension) Windows, kille…

Excellent point in the last paragraph. Python, JavaScript, Rust, Swift, and C# all have/had business models and business advocates in a way that Perl never did.
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