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Perl's decline was cultural

beatworm.co.uk

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Re: Perl's decline was cultural

#431

Post by writtiewrat »

altairprime wrote: post #424
writtiewrat wrote: post #244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 m…

Regarding restrictions vs. perfect freedom, I think it's also about trade-offs, implementation quality, etc. Typescript has very easy and well-defined escape hatches. Conversely, Rust's escape hatches are an active research field, not well-defined, considered significantly difficult by prominent Rust figures, the safety is leaky (for instance no_std), etc.

C is also a significantly stricter language in some ways than Perl, due to its static type system, despite that type system being primitive. C, ironically, is in some ways way stricter than Rust, since it has a goal of simplicity in its language, and thus writing compilers for it (despite its ancient syntax) and standardizing it is much easier than for Rust. And those properties are rather good for a systems language. Simplicity in the language does of course not generally necessarily translate to simplicity in the code, the ability to create good abstractions is worth a lot.

Rust has also experimented with editions. And there is the issue of Rust allowing backwards compatibility to be broken regarding type inference AFAI recall, in part leading to the 1.80 time crate debacle.

Re: Perl's decline was cultural

#432

Post by pavel_lishin »

alsetmusic wrote: post #189
phil21 wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yep, first language I learned. And since I was somewhat early to the Internet thing, I found IRC when I was about 14 years old and actually learned from a lot of the folks who have authored books on Perl or are at least (were) well known in the community. It certainly was the major factor in how I connected the dots! Haven’t really thought about it until now, but I suppose having Larry Wall and Randal Schwartz tellin…

Not the person you replied to, but I thought the same thing. Perl was my first as well, and it certainly shaped the way I think about coding. It made Python feel too rigid and Ruby feel familiar. There's something to be said for the restrictions of an environment when you're learning how to operate in a domain that seems to shape future thinking. I'm sure there are people who started in a language and later found som…

> It made Python feel too rigid and Ruby feel familiar.

That's so funny to me; I like Python, and dislike Perl & Ruby. Something about Ruby rubs me the wrong way - I could name a few things that I think are _objectively_ bad decisions in the language's design, but it's mostly about an aesthetic preference that's just a matter of taste.

Re: Perl's decline was cultural

#433

Post by ab5tract »

amiga386 wrote: post #348
asus386 wrote: post #314

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well isn't that nice. The boxes I care most about are 32 bit. The perl I use is 5.0 circa 2008. May you amiga386, or anyone else, thank you in advance, may be able to tell me what do I need to upgrade to perl 5.8? Is it only perl 5.8 and whatever is the contemporaneous gcc? Will the rest of my Suse 11.1 circa 2008, crunch? May I have two gcc's on the same box/distro version, and give the path to the later one when I…

suse 11.1 includes perl 5.10: https://ftp5.gwdg.de/pub/opensuse/discontinued/distribution/... perl 5.8 was released in 2002. perl 5.000 (there is no perl 5.0) was released in 1994. I have difficulty accepting you have perl "5.0" installed.

I assumed 5.0 was referring to using any of the 5.00x series.

Re: Perl's decline was cultural

#435

Post by rini17 »

No mention of taint mode, you had to untaint all data coming from user. By comparing to fixed string or convert to number or filter through regexp at least. If this were more broadly adopted, would save everyone so many headaches.

Re: Perl's decline was cultural

#436

Post by oofbey »

wlonkly wrote: post #242
Insanity wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t know about the wider Perl community, but I listened to some interviews from Larry Wall and he just came across as a nerdy guy having fun with what he’s doing. I quite liked listening to him.

Larry was (and presumably is, but I'm out of that loop) a gem. The Weird Al of programming languages. Hilarious and kind. But those who remember the regulars of, say, efnet #perl (THIS ISN'T A HELP CHANNEL), there was a dearth of kindness for sure. I was probably part of it too, because that was the culture! This is where the wizards live, why are you here asking us questions? Like cms, I'm also hesitant to name name…

Maybe in retrospect instead of “this isn’t a help channel” it should have said “go to #perl-help for questions” or made #perl be an open forum and moved the wizard discussion to #perl-experts?

Re: Perl's decline was cultural

#437

Post by larodi »

I have experienced the decline in interest in Perl firsthand - having teached a class in Practical Perl Programming for 10 years at a local major university. First years saw 270ppl, second 150, then 100, 80, 50, and I think the last issue was 12 people.

I can speculate a lot about what killed Perl, or at least what called the schism, and in general what was the cause of the schism had roots in what Perl failed to innovate on. The cultural stuff was a side-effect of it.

But then also - Perl has huuuge impact on so many other languages, including JavaScript, that its place in the hall of fame cannot ever be disputed.

Re: Perl's decline was cultural

#438

Post by smw »

petesergeant wrote: post #277
sammy2255 wrote: post #53

I don't understand how Perl fell off and PHP didn't

mod_php was dramatically simpler to use than mod_perl. If the sysadmin set it up, you didn't need to know it was there, and your regular PHP just ran really fast. That and nothing else really copied the "scriptable HTML file" paradigm which some people really really liked and made a very low barrier to entry compared to Perl. That's really what kicked off the demise of Perl -- it stopped being the most accessible way…

I think this is the answer. PHP stayed relevant for so long because deployment was simple and the per-page-load performance hit was reasonably low.

Re: Perl's decline was cultural

#440

Post by m463 »

mmastrac wrote: post #4

In fairness, Perl died because it was just not a good language compared to others that popped up after its peak. Sometimes people just move to the better option.

When I learned perl, I encountered a way to express myself more easily than any other language. For example, being able to say not only "if foo" but "unless bar" gave me a more fluid vocabulary to get things out of my head and into code.

Thing is, it worked great for ME but when I started interacting with other people's perl code, it all broke down.

One person would write it all on one line. Another would be extra verbose. Some would use all the idioms, others would be 10 levels of nested braces.

Every person's brain expressed itself differently and it was much harder to find common ground.

Eventually I left perl for python, which seemed to be more sane. It seemed pythonic was more of a thing and the code was more readable. Also, it had a large standard library and you didn't have to leave the language to solve just about any problem. It did require extra effort to write code, but the benefits were pretty obvious.

A couple other sort of random points - perl 6 was delayed and that might have hurt the language. Just the same python 3 did come out, but the 2 to 3 changeover was a huge negative to the language.

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