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Perl's decline was cultural

beatworm.co.uk

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Re: Perl's decline was cultural

#61

Post by lemonwaterlime »

Rather than its "decline was", Perl's existence is cultural. All programming languages (or any thought tools) are reflections and projections of the cognitive values of the community who creates and maintains them. In short, the Perl language shares the structure of the typical Perl dev's mind.

A shift to Python or Ruby is fundamentally a shift to a different set of core cognitive patterns. This influences how problems are solved and how sense is made of the world, with the programming languages being tools to facilitate and, more often than not, shepherd thought processes.

The culture shift we have seen with corporations and socialized practices for collaboration, coding conventions, and more coincides with the decline of a language that does in fact have a culture that demands you RTFM. Now, the dominant culture in tech is one that either centralizes solutions to extract and rent seek or that pretends that complexity and nuance does not exist so as to move as quickly as possible, externalizing the consequences until later.

If you've been on this forum for a while, what I am saying should seem familiar, because the foundations have already been laid out in "The Pervert's Guide to Computer Programming", which applies Lacanian psychoanalysis to cognitive patterns present in various languages[1][2]. This explains the so-called decline of Perl—many people still quietly use it in the background. It also explains the conflict between Rust and C culture.

As an aside, I created a tool that can use this analysis to help companies hire devs even if they use unorthodox languages like Zig or Nim. I also briefly explored exposing it as a SaaS to help HR make sense of this (since most HR generalists don't code and so have to go with their gut on interviews, which requires them to repeat what they have already seen). With that stated, I don't believe there is a large enough market for such a tool in this hiring economy. I could be wrong.

[1] [PDF] -- "The Pervert's Guide to Computer Programming" https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/vulk-blog/ThePervertsGuid...

[2] [YouTube Vulc Coop]-- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mZyvIHYn2zk

Re: Perl's decline was cultural

#62

Post by dbalatero »

sammy2255 wrote: post #53

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

I think PHP is way more accessible syntactically, even with all the standard complaints about the language. In the early 2000s it felt like "simple C style function calls embedded in HTML templates" more or less. Not much to have to teach there.

And serving it tends to be "copy the files to your web server's public dir".

Re: Perl's decline was cultural

#63

Post by diegof79 »

There is no doubt that a product’s community culture and the maintainer’s attitude have a significant influence.

However, I used Perl and stopped using it without knowing anything about its internal politics or community. PHP, ASP, Java JSP and later Rails were much better than Perl for web development.

* I know that for some the mention of JSP will be rare, as it was ugly… However in the 2000s it was the state of the art

Re: Perl's decline was cultural

#64

Post by zahlman »

amiga386 wrote: post #26
superkuh wrote: post #2

Perl's "decline" saved it from a fate worst than death: popularity and splitting into dozens of incompatible versions from added/removed features (like python). Instead Perl is just available everywhere in the same stable form. Scripts always can just use the system perl interpreter. And most of the time a script written in $currentyear can run just as well on a perl system interpreter from 2 decades ago (and vice ve…

Perl's binary brings with it the ability to run every release of the language, from 5.8 onwards. You can mix and match Perl 5.30 code with 5.8 code with 5.20 code, whatever, just say "use v5.20.0;" at the start of each module or script. By comparison, Python can barely go one version without both introducing new things and removing old things from the language, so anything written in Python is only safe for a a fragi…

> By comparison, Python can barely go one version without both introducing new things and removing old things from the language

Overwhelmingly, what gets removed is from the standard library, and it's extremely old stuff. As recently as 3.11 you could use `distutils` (the predecessor to Setuptools). And in 3.12 you could still use `pipes` (a predecessor to `subprocess` that nobody ever talked about even when `subprocess` was new; `subprocess` was viewed as directly replacing DIY with `os.system` and the `os.exec` family). And `sunau`. And `telnetlib`.

Can you show me a real-world package that was held back because the code needed a feature or semantics from the interpreter* of a 3.x Python version that was going EOL?

> Python interpreter: if you can tell "print" is being used as a keyword rather than a function call, in order to scold the programmer for doing that, you can equally just perform the function call.

No, that doesn't work because the statement form has radically different semantics. You'd need to keep the entire grammar for it (and decide what to do if someone tries to embed a "print statement" in a larger expression). Plus the function calls can usually be parsed as the statement form with entirely permissible parentheses, so you have to decide whether a file that uses the statement should switch everything over to the legacy parsing. Plus the function call affords syntax that doesn't work with the original statement form, so you have to decide whether to accept those as well, or else how to report the error. Plus in 2.7, surrounding parentheses are not redundant, and change the meaning:

  $ py2.7 
  Python 2.7.18 (default, Feb 20 2025, 09:47:11) 
  [GCC 13.3.0] on linux2
  Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.
  >>> print('foo', 'bar')
  ('foo', 'bar')
  >>> print 'foo', 'bar'
  foo bar
The incompatible bytes/string handling is also a fundamental shift. You would at least need a pragma.

Re: Perl's decline was cultural

#65

Post by eduction »

tguvot wrote: post #14

I spent year developing CMS in Perl in 1999 (HTA application with ActivePerl. wonder if anybody else did something like this). It traumatized me, and first thing that I did in my next job is to learn python and develop some core systems in it. Few of my friends moved from perl to python as well. I still remember spending time with my coworkers on bench outside of building trying to figure out #@$%$^&$%@something = []…

Perl heads are downvoting you but I agree as a longtime ex Perl user that the sigils were noisy nonsense.

The original intent was you could see var types with them - $scalar, @array, %hash.

They immediately broke this by deciding the sigil would apply to the value /extracted/ from the data structure. So you declared array @foo but accessed an element as $foo[1]. What? There’s a logic there but already you’re violating many people’s expectations so why even have them. The sigils are now confusing many people instead of clarifying anything.

The sigil idea then /completely/ failed when they introduced references and “complex data structures” (nesting arrays within arrays like every other language - in Perl this was a special thing because they had been flattening lists by default so no way to put one inside another).

So now to get at a hash in a hash you used not % but $ since a reference is a scalar. $hash1->$hash2->{“key”}. Versus $hash3{“key”} for a simple hash. Just awful noisy syntax. Due to poor language design up front.

Re: Perl's decline was cultural

#66

Post by dunham »

dc396 wrote: post #18

I was a fairly heavy user of Perl, but eventually migrated to Python. The primary reason was the generally abysmal quality of what was in CPAN compared to what was available as third-party packages for Python. I found myself having to spend way too much time fixing stuff I pulled down from CPAN far more than I'd need to for Python for the same functionality. Undoubtedly Perl stuff got better, but I didn't have time t…

I mainly moved on to Python because the startup time for scripts seemed to be a lot worse for Perl. I was a heavy Perl user in the 90's and early 2000's.

Re: Perl's decline was cultural

#67

Post by hinkley »

> if difficulty itself becomes a badge of honour, you've created a trap: anything that makes the system more approachable starts to feel like it's cheapening what you achieved. You become invested in preserving the barriers you overcame.

The mentality described here has always galled me. Half the reason I’m willing to scramble up these hills is to gain the perspective to look for an easier way up the next time. It’s my reward for slogging through, not for the gathering of sycophants.

I’m not sure you’ve mastered a thing until you’ve changed the recipe to make it a little bit better anyway. My favorite pumpkin pie recipe, isn’t. As written the order of operation creates clumps, which can only be cured with an electric mixer. You shouldn’t need an electric mixer to mix pumpkin pie filling. If you mix all the dry ingredients first, you get no clumps. And it’s too soupy. Needs jumbo eggs, not large. So that is my favorite recipe.

But maybe this is why I end up writing so many tools and so much documentation, instead of hoarding.

Re: Perl's decline was cultural

#68

Post by pavel_lishin »

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.

I'm having to pick up some perl now, and while I don't interact with the community, it surely _feels_ like it was written by wizards, for wizards. Obscure, non-intuitive oneliners, syntax that feels like it was intentionally written to be complicated, and a few other things that feel impossible to understand without reading the docs. (Before everyone jumps on me - yes, as a developer, I should be able to read documentation. And I did. But until I did so, what the code was doing was completely opaque to me. That feels like bad language design.)

Some of it I recognize as being an artefact of the time, when conciseness really mattered. But it's still obnoxious in 2025.

The whole thing reminds me of D&D, which is full of classes & spells that only exist in modern D&D because of One Guy who happened to be at the table with Gygax, who really wanted to be a wuxia guy he saw in a movie, or because he really wanted a spell to be applicable for that one night at the table, and now it's hard-coded into the game.

Re: Perl's decline was cultural

#69

Post by mschuster91 »

cwyers wrote: post #60
mschuster91 wrote: post #51

I don't get why Ruby is mentioned before PHP. The only Ruby thing I've ever come across is GitLab, and not with positive associations either - up until maybe 3, 4 years ago particularly Sidekiq was a constant point of utter pain.

I was surprised by that, too, and assumed it was a decade-old article until I saw the date at the bottom. Both being mentioned before Python is wilder, as is the total exclusion of JavaScript.

JavaScript on the backend is a rare thing to see, even in "resume driven development" scenarios it's usually some sort of static build that gets pushed to S3 or whatever.

Re: Perl's decline was cultural

#70

Post by tmp10423288442 »

simonw wrote: post #42
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.

I appreciated them at the time I encountered them (mid-2000s), but they were definitely a bit cringe in their frequency and shamelessness. I wonder if younger people even know Monty Python anymore - by my time, I think people had mostly forgotten about Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, even if 42 survived.
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