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Perl's decline was cultural

beatworm.co.uk

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Re: Perl's decline was cultural

#441

Post by redbar0n »

hinkley wrote: post #75
nine_k wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Perl is a great language, the way Scala and Haskell are great: as openly experimental languages, they tried interesting, unorthodox approaches, with varied success. "More than one way to do it" is Perl's motto, because of its audacious experimentation ethos, I'd say. Perl is not that good a language though for practical purposes. The same way, a breadboard contraption is not what you want to ship as your hardware pro…

The big pearl of wisdom I took from Larry Wall seemed to be counter to the culture I experienced looking in from the outside. That always confused me a bit about Perl. And that was, paraphrased: make the way you want something to be used be the most concise way to use it and make the more obscure features be wordy. This could have been the backbone of an entire community but they diminished it to code golf.

In two concepts: syntactic sugar vs syntactic vinegar.

Re: Perl's decline was cultural

#442

Post by redbar0n »

asa400 wrote: post #210
jerf wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Erlang is, by my accounting, not even a functional langauge at all. It takes more than just having immutable values to be functional, and forcing users to leave varibles as immutable was a mistake, which Elixir fixes. Erlang code in practice is just imperative code written with immutable values, and like a lot of other modern languages, occasional callouts to things borrowed from functional programming like "map", bu…

> Erlang is, by my accounting, not even a functional langauge at all. How do you figure? The essence of FP is functions of the shape `data -> data` rather than `data -> void`, deemphasizing object-based identity, and treating functions as first-class tools for abstraction. There's enough dynamic FP languages at this point to establish that these traits are held in common with the static FP languages. Is Clojure not a…

x = x + 1

always annoyed me as a syntax for binding, when first learning programming, coming from using = in equational reasoning in mathematics.

x: x + 1

would have been more natural as assignment/binding, imho.

Re: Perl's decline was cultural

#443

Post by colinstrickland »

chromatic wrote: post #430
topspin wrote: post #421

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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.

Do you not think O'Reilly Associates fits some of that role? It seemed like Perl had more commercial backing compared to the other scripting languages if anything at that point. Python and JavaScript were picked up by Google, but later. Amazon was originally built out of Perl. Perl never converted its industry footprint into that kind of advocacy, I think some of that is also culture-driven.

Re: Perl's decline was cultural

#444

Post by lesostep »

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!

I think it's a sysadmin thing to have a little bit more wimsy in the code.

Administrative work by nature leaves you a bit bored, if you do it right. So you sometimes pick something up just to play with.

I can't speak about every sysad experience, but in mine a lot of scripts tend to be in a "make once, remember for ten years" category, and even a bit of creative naming can help a long way.

Working with a larger codebase with "creative" code, on the other hand, is frustrating. And if you don't have to write code, you might as well go take a walk, "monitoring" isn't in your job description.

Re: Perl's decline was cultural

#445

Post by PunchyHamster »

dragonwriter wrote: post #240
PunchyHamster wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Perl made a mistake, the language was invested in depth of expression and that, in a programming language, just leads to a 1000 ways to write same thing where like... 2 of them are actually nice to read. Pyton was ("was" was used here on purpose) the opposite, the whole "one way to do a thing" and insisting on more clean code even if more verbose. You could write nice looking Perl code but you had to choose to do it,…

> the whole "one way to do a thing" There’s a whole lot of words popularly excised (as you just did) from that line of the Zen to create a false polar opposite to Perl’s TMTOWTDI that was never actually part of Python’s philosophy. The actual line from the Zen of Python is: “ There should be one— and preferably only one — obvious way to do it.” (omissions in italics).

And the Perl way is opposite, which is what my point was? I'm not sure what you want to say here

Re: Perl's decline was cultural

#446

Post by pezezin »

bigstrat2003 wrote: post #309
stack_framer wrote: post #197

Should the Rust community take a lesson here, and maybe the Zig community to an extent? To me it seems that some in the Rust community in particular, perhaps because they're just the most vocal, are tightly coupled to progressive, social activism. I guess in general I just find myself wishing that political and social issues could be entirely left out of technical communities.

Agreed. The Rust community is an incredibly toxic place because they are so determined to involve politics in tech. I love the language, but I stay as far away from the community as I possibly can.

Oh man, here we go again. I see way more people complaining about the supposedly toxic Rust community than actual toxic Rust fans...

Re: Perl's decline was cultural

#447

Post by unixhero »

lizmat wrote: post #434
unixhero wrote: post #423

Is anyone programming in Rakudo/Perl6?

Technically, no. As Rakudo is not a programming language, and Perl6 is a deadname. But there are indeed plenty of people doing projects with the Raku Programming Language.

Plenty of people then. Okay! I meant Raku, yes.

Re: Perl's decline was cultural

#448

Post by noobermin »

stack_framer wrote: post #197

Should the Rust community take a lesson here, and maybe the Zig community to an extent? To me it seems that some in the Rust community in particular, perhaps because they're just the most vocal, are tightly coupled to progressive, social activism. I guess in general I just find myself wishing that political and social issues could be entirely left out of technical communities.

But don't you know, as OP said, Perl are reactionaries. Rust is progressive, and that's good!

Re: Perl's decline was cultural

#449

Post by zahlman »

array_key_first wrote: post #248
stack_framer wrote: post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I think it's our civic duty to crusade for those causes Why crusade using the resources of a technical community though? Surely it alienates the people who don't happen to align with the causes important to you. There are myriad ways to perform your civic duty in your city. You could knock doors and encourage people to vote, for example. Why do it through a technical community?

There is zero way you don't alienate anyone. Ask women software engineers if they ever feel alienated. That's the reason why some communities like the python community do outreach for minorities in tech. I'm a white man, and I have never felt "alienated" in so-called progressive spaces.

> Ask women software engineers if they ever feel alienated.

I have, on multiple occasions. The general summary of what I have learned from doing so, is that they find it cringe to ask, and appear annoyed by the suspicion that they're getting roped into someone else's political battle.

> That's the reason why some communities like the python community do outreach for minorities in tech.

No, they do it because it aligns with the cultural values of the people in charge. (As it happens, it also aligned with GvR's values when he was in charge.)

> I'm a white man, and I have never felt "alienated" in so-called progressive spaces.

... You don't feel alienated when people in your vicinity openly use pejorative language to refer to groups that you belong to (and don't have a choice about), or decry politicians or even pundits that dare to validate your grievances as extremists? You don't feel alienated when it's proposed that your grievances are inherently invalid because of that group belonging? You don't feel alienated by being repeatedly told that said group belonging makes you inherently incapable of "empathy" for various others, even as that same "empathy" is demanded of you? You don't feel alienated by the cultural assumption that a desire for more progressive income taxation, or cleaner energy, dictates a raft of social policies? You don't feel alienated by the entire body of in-group jargon that associates your group membership with negative qualities, or the opposition to language unilaterally deemed to reflect your "privilege" regardless of actual etymology?

If you haven't experienced these things, please let me know where to find the "progressive spaces" you frequent. I don't think I've seen one since at least OWS.

Re: Perl's decline was cultural

#450

Post by zahlman »

array_key_first wrote: post #413
stack_framer wrote: post #360

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> outreach for minorities in tech Why is there no outreach to other minorities in tech, like the Amish, for example? They are certainly more underrepresented than women in the python community. Or how about male ballet dancers? Why isn't the python community allocating some of its resources to helping them feel seen and included? I'm giving ridiculous examples because the whole premise is ridiculous. And my general q…

> Why is there no outreach to other minorities in tech, like the Amish, for example? They are certainly more underrepresented than women in the python community. Well the amish wouldn't want the outreach, because they're amish. > There are plenty of other outlets more suitable for doing our civic duty. I kind of hate this mentality, because there's no logic or reasonableness behind it. There's ALWAYS another place yo…

> There's ALWAYS another place you can do something. Always. Where you draw the line is arbitrary.

Yes, that's the point. If you're drawing a line that agentively impacts others, you are the one responsible for defending where it's drawn.

> There's no rulebook anywhere saying we can't do this in tech.

Nobody is telling you that you can't do these things (except where impermissible by law). They are telling you not to rope or pressure unwilling others into it.

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