4 ms·

It's wrong to frame this as resistance to change for no reason. See my other comment. I see some of this stuff as repeating mistakes that were made in the des

It's wrong to frame this as resistance to change for no reason. See my other comment. I see some of this stuff as repeating mistakes that were made in the design of Perl. ...but there are quite few people around these days who know Perl well enough to recognize the way in which history is repeating itself, and that has at least something to do with age.

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knome 7y ago
"resistance-to-change for-no-reason" vs "resistance-to change-for-no-reason" :)
- mr_crankypants 7y ago
  Both of which, it's worth noting, are painfully obvious and uncharitable strawmen.
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- DangitBobby 7y ago
  This is possibly the best example of the ambiguity of language I've ever seen. Two contradictory meanings expressed in the exact same phrase, and both of them are valid in the broader context.
- ByThyGrace 7y ago
  Jeez. What number of people who read the same phrase with either of those two meanings then continue to form opinions and even make decisions based on the resulting meaning?
mr_crankypants 7y ago
Me, I am old enough to know Perl, and I've got plenty of one-line skeletons in my own closet. And it more-or-less entered the world already vastly more TMTOWTDI-y than Python is after 3 decades. FWIW, I tend to think of comparisons to Perl as being a lot like Nazi comparisons, only for programming languages. And I do think there's some wisdom to the Godwin's Law idea that the first person to make a Nazi comparison is understood to have automatically lost the argument. It's just that, at this point, Perl is both so near-universally reviled, and so well-understood to be way too optimized for code golf, that any comparison involving it is kind of a conversation-killer. As soon as it shows up, your best options are to either quietly ignore the statement in which the comparison was made, or join in escalating things into a flamewar.
- tialaramex 7y ago
  I wouldn't call it reviled. Perl makes for a poor general purpose programming language, it always did. You can write an HTTP server in Perl but you probably shouldn't. It's very good for what it was always intended for, those situations where you need to process some data, but like just once not every week for the rest of eternity. I've never regretted a Perl program that I wrote, used and discarded. And I've never been content with a Perl program I found I was still using a week after I wrote it.
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knome 7y ago

"resistance-to-change for-no-reason" vs "resistance-to change-for-no-reason" :)

mr_crankypants 7y ago
Both of which, it's worth noting, are painfully obvious and uncharitable strawmen.
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DangitBobby 7y ago
This is possibly the best example of the ambiguity of language I've ever seen. Two contradictory meanings expressed in the exact same phrase, and both of them are valid in the broader context.
ByThyGrace 7y ago
Jeez. What number of people who read the same phrase with either of those two meanings then continue to form opinions and even make decisions based on the resulting meaning?

mr_crankypants 7y ago

Me, I am old enough to know Perl, and I've got plenty of one-line skeletons in my own closet. And it more-or-less entered the world already vastly more TMTOWTDI-y than Python is after 3 decades. FWIW, I tend to think of comparisons to Perl as being a lot like Nazi comparisons, only for programming languages. And I do think there's some wisdom to the Godwin's Law idea that the first person to make a Nazi comparison is understood to have automatically lost the argument. It's just that, at this point, Perl is both so near-universally reviled, and so well-understood to be way too optimized for code golf, that any comparison involving it is kind of a conversation-killer. As soon as it shows up, your best options are to either quietly ignore the statement in which the comparison was made, or join in escalating things into a flamewar.

tialaramex 7y ago
I wouldn't call it reviled. Perl makes for a poor general purpose programming language, it always did. You can write an HTTP server in Perl but you probably shouldn't. It's very good for what it was always intended for, those situations where you need to process some data, but like just once not every week for the rest of eternity. I've never regretted a Perl program that I wrote, used and discarded. And I've never been content with a Perl program I found I was still using a week after I wrote it.
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