8 ms·

There was a lot of pressure in the Perl community to write things as succinctly as possible instead of as maintainably and understandably. That’s not realistic

There was a lot of pressure in the Perl community to write things as succinctly as possible instead of as maintainably and understandably. That’s not realistic for use in a field with a lot of turnover and job hopping.

chrisweekly 10mo ago
Yeah the joke was, Perl is write-only.
- superkuh 10mo ago
  Write-only perhaps, but with perl you only have to write it once and it'll run forever, anywhere. No breaking on updates, no containers, no special version of Perl just for $application, just the system perl. Because of this, in practice, the amount of system administration mantainence and care needed for perl programs is far, far less than other languages like python where you actually do have to go in and re-write it all the time due to dep hell and rapid changes/improvements to the language. For corporate application use cases these re-writes are happening anyway all the time so it doesn't matter. But for system administration it's a significant difference.
  - pjc50 10mo ago
    There was really only one big forced rewrite, 2->3, and ironically Perl was killed by failure to do the same with 5->6. I agree that python versioning and especially library packaging is the worst part of the language, though.
  - chrisweekly 10mo ago
    Agreed! My father (RIP) absolutely loved Perl and could do amazing things with it in seemingly impossibly-few characters. I got reasonably proficient w/ regex but never came close to his wizardry. Much respect for those in his rarified company.
  - JackSlateur 10mo ago
    Aren't perl modules locked to the exact version they were compiled in ? I've met many time some error "haha nope, wrong version, perl 5.31.7 required"
    - WesolyKubeczek 10mo ago
      Pure perl modules are not, unless they use syntactic features that first appear in the newer versions. Modules with C extensions have to be recompiled with libperl they run against, as much as CPython extensions link to a particular libpython, and guess Ruby is the same. But they, with very few exceptions, will recompile and run fine. XS is cryptic but its backwards compatibility story is good.
creer 10mo ago
There was no such pressure. That's ridiculous. There were a lot of things people could grab as reasons to form an opinion without even reading articles, never mind the tutorial. They then ended up with php or python, even java for crying out loud, and years later THAT was a problem.
- Supermancho 10mo ago
  > There was no such pressure. That's ridiculous. I lived it. I'm sure there's still some Mailing List archives and IRC snippets that still endure, demonstrating the utter vicious 1-upmanship of how to do something in Perl as succinctly as possible. Why do X and Y when you can just do Z? What are you really trying to do? etc.
  - creer 10mo ago
    You COULD, if you wanted, and spent quite a bit of effort in the pursuit of that hobby, participate in one-liner, or obfuscation, or golfing friendly contests. Which were enabled by perl's expressiveness constructs. Nobody pushed anyone into that. On the contrary "there is more than one way to do it" was there to legitimize that getting the problem solved was the goal - instead of trying to force a one true way (like python). After that, experts would often propose multiple ways to do something when they answered questions. THEY found that intellectually playful and exciting. They still do. And for the rest of us, that was an amazing way to learn more and understand more of that tool we were using daily. Still is. You apparently saw viciousness in this and that certainly sucks.
    - altairprime 10mo ago
      Those experts were horrendously vicious. I can name them and can still describe their dismissive cruelty, since I spent ten years socializing nonstop in the Perl5 core communities (and have a CPAN id, and have an Authors entry in Perl5 core). Think “Linus before he learned to stop insulting people’s worth and focus on critiquing their work instead”. It was absolutely intended as a form of cultural propagation: I can do this more succinctly, so You Should Be Ashamed Before Me. If somehow you weren’t exposed to that aspect of it, I envy you. Interestingly, that same prideful “my way is so obviously better that it’s a ridiculous waste of my time considering yours” ended up carrying forward to Mozilla, which was launched in part by cultural exports of the Perl5 conservative-libertarian community, and for a decade developer hiring was filtered for cultural sameness, leaving a forest of TMTOWTDI trees that viewed meadows as an aberration to be reforested back to their sameness.

chrisweekly 10mo ago

Yeah the joke was, Perl is write-only.

superkuh 10mo ago
Write-only perhaps, but with perl you only have to write it once and it'll run forever, anywhere. No breaking on updates, no containers, no special version of Perl just for $application, just the system perl. Because of this, in practice, the amount of system administration mantainence and care needed for perl programs is far, far less than other languages like python where you actually do have to go in and re-write it all the time due to dep hell and rapid changes/improvements to the language. For corporate application use cases these re-writes are happening anyway all the time so it doesn't matter. But for system administration it's a significant difference.
- pjc50 10mo ago
  There was really only one big forced rewrite, 2->3, and ironically Perl was killed by failure to do the same with 5->6. I agree that python versioning and especially library packaging is the worst part of the language, though.
- chrisweekly 10mo ago
  Agreed! My father (RIP) absolutely loved Perl and could do amazing things with it in seemingly impossibly-few characters. I got reasonably proficient w/ regex but never came close to his wizardry. Much respect for those in his rarified company.
- JackSlateur 10mo ago
  Aren't perl modules locked to the exact version they were compiled in ? I've met many time some error "haha nope, wrong version, perl 5.31.7 required"
  - WesolyKubeczek 10mo ago
    Pure perl modules are not, unless they use syntactic features that first appear in the newer versions. Modules with C extensions have to be recompiled with libperl they run against, as much as CPython extensions link to a particular libpython, and guess Ruby is the same. But they, with very few exceptions, will recompile and run fine. XS is cryptic but its backwards compatibility story is good.

creer 10mo ago

There was no such pressure. That's ridiculous. There were a lot of things people could grab as reasons to form an opinion without even reading articles, never mind the tutorial. They then ended up with php or python, even java for crying out loud, and years later THAT was a problem.

Supermancho 10mo ago
> There was no such pressure. That's ridiculous. I lived it. I'm sure there's still some Mailing List archives and IRC snippets that still endure, demonstrating the utter vicious 1-upmanship of how to do something in Perl as succinctly as possible. Why do X and Y when you can just do Z? What are you really trying to do? etc.
- creer 10mo ago
  You COULD, if you wanted, and spent quite a bit of effort in the pursuit of that hobby, participate in one-liner, or obfuscation, or golfing friendly contests. Which were enabled by perl's expressiveness constructs. Nobody pushed anyone into that. On the contrary "there is more than one way to do it" was there to legitimize that getting the problem solved was the goal - instead of trying to force a one true way (like python). After that, experts would often propose multiple ways to do something when they answered questions. THEY found that intellectually playful and exciting. They still do. And for the rest of us, that was an amazing way to learn more and understand more of that tool we were using daily. Still is. You apparently saw viciousness in this and that certainly sucks.
  - altairprime 10mo ago
    Those experts were horrendously vicious. I can name them and can still describe their dismissive cruelty, since I spent ten years socializing nonstop in the Perl5 core communities (and have a CPAN id, and have an Authors entry in Perl5 core). Think “Linus before he learned to stop insulting people’s worth and focus on critiquing their work instead”. It was absolutely intended as a form of cultural propagation: I can do this more succinctly, so You Should Be Ashamed Before Me. If somehow you weren’t exposed to that aspect of it, I envy you. Interestingly, that same prideful “my way is so obviously better that it’s a ridiculous waste of my time considering yours” ended up carrying forward to Mozilla, which was launched in part by cultural exports of the Perl5 conservative-libertarian community, and for a decade developer hiring was filtered for cultural sameness, leaving a forest of TMTOWTDI trees that viewed meadows as an aberration to be reforested back to their sameness.