4 ms·

This is probably one of the best unintended things to ever happen. Using other languages is the equivalent of world travel for a human. All the worst code I'v

by kev009 11y ago

This is probably one of the best unintended things to ever happen. Using other languages is the equivalent of world travel for a human. All the worst code I've ever seen is written by one language programmers, and perl is among the top of that category for a variety of reasons. I have seen maintainable, performant perl5, but the barrier is high.

SwellJoe 11y ago
That's a nice way of looking at the brain drain in the Perl community over the last decade. And, you're probably right. If we think in terms of general health of the free and open programming world, it has been remarkably improved by some of the folks who've migrated through different languages over the years. To the point where we have not one, not two, not a dozen, really nice languages with excellent communities, but several dozens of them (and at least two dozen that are large enough and effective enough to build pretty much anything with them). We have an embarrassment of riches, frankly. There was a time when going into a large project, you could choose between Java, C/C++, or Perl. There were outliers (even some with significant footholds in some industries, like TCL), but those were the options I saw in front of me at every junction. Today, we can choose to work in so many languages, and get good results, find good community, find good library and tooling and cross-platform support, and enjoy all the stuff we found so nice about Perl way back when.
- kev009 11y ago
  Indeed, perl people were and still are fanatical about easy text (i.e. richer than cstring) manipulation, and those other two languages fell short back then and even today you still have to do gymnastics for things perl does easy and well out of the box. Text is something that a majority of applications need to deal with at some point, and a source of hard bugs and security issues when done wrong. I am thankful for perl's influence, but I disregard it as a serious language outside of some niches like ETL and log processing. I'm skeptic that perl6 will change that, and there's been so much progress elsewhere that failure doesn't matter much, but I will wait a couple more years to see how the community responds and take a look at it myself if it pans out.
  - iheartmemcache 11y ago
    Perl 6's semantics are so different from Perl 5 it should effectively be a new language. It has metaprogramming macros like CL, concurrency that's as well thought out as Erlang/OTP, they eliminated all of the syntax warts that Perl 5 had with all the implicit magic, and out-of-the-box is absolutely fantastic with rules/grammars that I'd argue it's about as good as Haskell's Parsec. (Speaking of Haskell, I've seen some code that's written in a purely functional Haskell-ish fashion in idiomatic Perl 6.) Oh and there's finally a good object system instead of stop-gapping with Moose (which actually was kind of fun, meta-object programming was cobbled on, but I digress). The take away - don't conflate it with your 1995 Perl. It's about as similar to Perl 5 as C#1 (pre-generics, pre-LINQ, pre-RX, pre-async, pre-NuGet, pre-basically-everything-good) is to modern C#.
    - baudehlo 11y ago
      There are syntax warts in there. Just new ones.
      - paulddraper 11y ago
        Any example?
pron 11y ago
> All the worst code I've ever seen is written by one language programmers Some of the worst code I've seen was written by people who think the choice of programming language matters all that much (the rest was written by beginners or physicists).

by kev009 11y ago

SwellJoe 11y ago

That's a nice way of looking at the brain drain in the Perl community over the last decade. And, you're probably right. If we think in terms of general health of the free and open programming world, it has been remarkably improved by some of the folks who've migrated through different languages over the years. To the point where we have not one, not two, not a dozen, really nice languages with excellent communities, but several dozens of them (and at least two dozen that are large enough and effective enough to build pretty much anything with them). We have an embarrassment of riches, frankly. There was a time when going into a large project, you could choose between Java, C/C++, or Perl. There were outliers (even some with significant footholds in some industries, like TCL), but those were the options I saw in front of me at every junction. Today, we can choose to work in so many languages, and get good results, find good community, find good library and tooling and cross-platform support, and enjoy all the stuff we found so nice about Perl way back when.

kev009 11y ago
Indeed, perl people were and still are fanatical about easy text (i.e. richer than cstring) manipulation, and those other two languages fell short back then and even today you still have to do gymnastics for things perl does easy and well out of the box. Text is something that a majority of applications need to deal with at some point, and a source of hard bugs and security issues when done wrong. I am thankful for perl's influence, but I disregard it as a serious language outside of some niches like ETL and log processing. I'm skeptic that perl6 will change that, and there's been so much progress elsewhere that failure doesn't matter much, but I will wait a couple more years to see how the community responds and take a look at it myself if it pans out.
- iheartmemcache 11y ago
  Perl 6's semantics are so different from Perl 5 it should effectively be a new language. It has metaprogramming macros like CL, concurrency that's as well thought out as Erlang/OTP, they eliminated all of the syntax warts that Perl 5 had with all the implicit magic, and out-of-the-box is absolutely fantastic with rules/grammars that I'd argue it's about as good as Haskell's Parsec. (Speaking of Haskell, I've seen some code that's written in a purely functional Haskell-ish fashion in idiomatic Perl 6.) Oh and there's finally a good object system instead of stop-gapping with Moose (which actually was kind of fun, meta-object programming was cobbled on, but I digress). The take away - don't conflate it with your 1995 Perl. It's about as similar to Perl 5 as C#1 (pre-generics, pre-LINQ, pre-RX, pre-async, pre-NuGet, pre-basically-everything-good) is to modern C#.
  - baudehlo 11y ago
    There are syntax warts in there. Just new ones.
    - paulddraper 11y ago
      Any example?

pron 11y ago

> All the worst code I've ever seen is written by one language programmers Some of the worst code I've seen was written by people who think the choice of programming language matters all that much (the rest was written by beginners or physicists).