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And suddenly, you're hip
- JonnieCache 16y agoCommunication skills correlate with social standing. News at 11. :)
- lwhi 16y agoSure, maybe the idea is obvious - I suppose the interesting question is 'how can a transformation occur?', which is something the article tries to address.
- lwhi 16y agoMarketing re-energised the web after the period of downtime after the dot-com crash (O'Reilly and Web 2.0), I'm sure it could similarly re-energise Perl. EDIT: If Web 2.0 wasn't a well crafted marketing campaign I don't know what is.
- julius_geezer 16y agoNow your edit is a phrase that would make a great tee shirt!
- msy 16y agoThing is, while both Ruby & Vim have been driven by what she's describing she neatly sidestepped why those movements got started in the first place. Ruby gained huge traction primarily via Rails because working on PHP is unenjoyable to many and Ruby is a really pleasant language to work with. Vim's recent resurgence can largely be traced to development of Textmate grinding to a complete halt. Textmate's rise a few years ago was due to BBEdit failing to evolve. Git beats seven shades of shit out of SVN. Erlang provides a proven answer to concurrency issues. Javascript is the only choice for the ever more important front-end side of web development. Each of these shifts of development momentum have rational, logical underpinnings. The buzz, the screen casts and other errata are a consequence of a lot of people making the same logical, reasoned choice and talking about it in public. I cannot think of anything that's changed in Perl that'd justify any such interest. I admit that may be my ignorance. Making sexy screencasts might get a little traffic but you can't astroturf wave of developer momentum with them.
- jsrn 16y ago> Vim's recent resurgence can largely be traced > to development of Textmate grinding to a complete > halt. makes sense - but then why didn't Emacs see an equivalent resurgence (although personally I think Emacs did see a resurgence, not because of Textmate but because of Org Mode). > Git beats seven shades of shit out of SVN. you could argue the same for Mercurial (or darcs, for that matter). But Git had the better initial marketing, Github, the Ruby folks used it etc. > I cannot think of anything that's changed in Perl > that'd justify any such interest. hm, CPAN (and the arguably failed attempts to copy it by other language communities), Moose, MooseX::Declare, Devel::REPL, Dancer, Mojolicious, Task::Kensho, ...
- mechanical_fish 16y agoI think emacs did see a similar resurgance, for the same reason that vim has. We just each tend to notice different resurgances depending on which editor we use... And here's some constructive criticism for the aspiring Perl advocate: Stop talking in acronyms and obscure library names. What the hell is Moose and what real world problem does it solve significantly better than the popular alternatives? Same for CPAN, frankly. Most people younger than me don't get it when you name-check CPAN. What does that stand for?Give me a killer app for CPAN, preferably one that people care about. Note that the parent post speaks in use cases: Ruby is for problem X, Erlang is for problem Y, JavaScript is for problem Z. What is Perl for, and why won't Ruby work just as well?
- pwpwp 16y agoemacs? Stop talking in acronyms and obscure names. Same for vim, frankly. Most people younger than me don't get it when you name-check vim. What does that stand for? :P
- evilduck 16y agoThe differences I see here are that a) emacs vs. vim has been a holy war that has gone on since both were conceived and is a debate which is often older than the programmers discussing it. To be ignorant of recent language developments or internal acronyms is excusable, to be ignorant of vim/emacs is less so. b) emacs and vim are not specific to any one language. Dropping acronyms that are non-specific to the topic (perl vs ruby, python, whatever) doesn't have some domain specific knowledge attached to it. If you're on either side of the debate, vim can be equally familiar or obscure.
- cturner 16y agowhere btw is A NICE HIP FEMALE PHRASE I COULD PRINT ON A SHIRT? I'm a vim ballerina! "we" are literally invisible to the bigger public, not matter how much CPAN grows and no matter how much #perl is the biggest IRC channel on freenode. Secret societies are cool.
- lwhi 16y agoHere's an idea -> bring visitors to the perl.org front-page directly to #perl freenode channel, via a JS IRC client. Let them speak directly with core users from the very start.
- kentnl 16y agoNice idea, but what tends to happen is this: -- User1235 has joined #perl -- user1235> PERL SUCKS 111!!!11!!1!!11!! -- Chanserv set mode +o mst -- -- user1235 was kicked ( troll ) -- The people who are honestly interested tend not to need the door shown to them, and people who aren't interested can't be convinced by such tactics.
- rbxbx 16y agoI don't see why females can't be ninjas and rockstars, or are these things just not as appealing to the "fairer sex"?
- michaelchisari 16y agoI thought this part of the essay was strange, because they sure as hell can be. Courtney Love, Brody Dalle, Joan Jett. Not to mention: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kunoichi http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kunoichi
- mhd 16y agoI don't know, but being a "Perl rockstar" would probably evoke a more "prog rock" feel, not exactly the best target if you aim for sex appeal. (NB: I do like both Perl and prog rock, so I personally wouldn't have problems with that.)
- pwpwp 16y agoNice article, although I'd fear a "Project for a New Perl Century". If there were an International Criminal Court for Programmer Rights, Perl should be the first language tried for crimes against programmerdom.
- sigzero 16y agoAny "crimes" were the fault of the programmer and not the language. Period. End of story.
- varjag 16y agoAlso, Ruby is a better language than Perl. No amount of campaigning will change that. (Before anyone follows-up with the usual "the right tool for the job", it's not the point here. There are good screwdrivers and bad screwdrivers).
- lwhi 16y agoThere are also phillips head, straight edge and torx :)
- varjag 16y agoEach come in good and bad variety.
- lwhi 16y agoTrue - but you need to compare like-to-like to make a fair comparison.
- nzmsv 16y agoThere is also Robertson, which is superior to Philips, but lost due to poor marketing :)
- pronoiac 16y agoWhat I'd heard was that the Robertson screw, though awesome, didn't take off due to exorbitant royalties, but checking, it looks like he refused to license them to let anyone else make them after getting burned, & having only one supplier worried Henry Ford too much to use them. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_screw_drives#Robertson http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_screw_drives#Robertson
- lwhi 16y agoSounds a bit like Android vs iOS (or Windows vs. MacOS).
- 16y ago
- va_coder 16y agoWhy Ruby? is a pretty damn good presentation. He talks about how the benefits include the culture, as well as the language. http://ontwik.com/ruby/david-hansson-why-ruby/ http://ontwik.com/ruby/david-hansson-why-ruby/
- edu 16y agoI came to comment just the same. I used to work with Perl for about 4+ years, and now I'm on my way to exit a PHP work after 2 years. My next project will be in Ruby and this presentation helped me to rationalize the guts I had for Ruby (I've been playing a little bit with it). The idea of making tools that are joyful to use to the programmers (wether it's the programming language, the editor, the SCM...) is something that appeals a lot to me, and it's something that (unfortunately) Perl lacks, basically due to it's syntax. The community around the languages also affects, both have a great community around with hundreds of incredibly smart people with it's own quirkinesses, but the Ruby quirkinesses are more appealing to me (think DHH or _why) than Perl's (think Larry Wall or all the JAPH/golf...).
- Su-Shee 16y agoThis is bascially what I was talking about. Though the Ruby community managed somehow to drive off _why and someone like Zed Shaw if I remember correctly. If that really appeals to you...
- danieldon 16y agoif I remember correctly You don't. _why left open source for unknown reasons.
- pharrington 16y agoDon't really wanna go down here, but _why left after someone claimed to post his IRL name/info
- 16y ago
- mfukar 16y agoI don't get it; when the Perl folk thought they had to reach the masses, instead of making Perl 5 more accessible to newbies, instead of covering Perl events (a comment on the blog mentions some specialized hardware for doing so - lol), instead of actively pushing Perl projects, they decided to come up with Perl 6! Yet Perl 6, except from some blog posts describing its utter dominance over Perl 5 performance, still hasn't seen the coverage/promotion it deserves (I'm assuming here, because I'm not using it). Maybe there are some lessons to be learned here.
- chromatic 16y agoI don't get it To start: there exist Perl programmers who have worked on both Perl 5 and Perl 6, specifically to make Perl 5 more accessible and to make Perl 6 more imminent. Don't assume the entire Perl community is a hivemind with a single shared purpose.
- po 16y agoI used to be a huge Perl advocate; I loooved perlmonks back in the day. (Just tried to log back into it after probably over 10 years but the forgot password link doesn't work) I read the Camel book cover-to-cover and giggled at the footnotes. While I loved the language, I can't imagine going back to it. Now perl programs look like cat typing to me. It was way too expressive. The TIMTOWDI mentality meant that I could never read code I didn't write myself, and even some that I did. It was terse and dense like poetry and hard to understand - like poetry. To really "know" the language meant knowing a huge surface area full of exceptions and special conditions. Sure, you could limit yourself to certain best-practices and styles but it was like being handing the keys to the porsche and told to only drive 35. At every turn, the language was begging you to flex that newly acquired knowledge of special syntax. The obfuscation contests, the perl poetry, the quines… Many languages have this failing in my opinion and it certainly matters more when you're working in a large team (hence, rigid boring old Java) but Perl taught me what it was like to go too far down that path. It is what I would call a write-only language.
- berntb 16y ago>>Just tried to log back into [Perlmonks] after probably over 10 years >>It is what I would call a write-only language. I get a bit of vertigo, here... You really left about a decade ago -- and don't seem to know much about what has happened since. But you have opinions?! (If you wonder what is wrong with that quote, check the Best Practices book. [Edit: And as someone noted, chromatic's "Modern Perl" is good.] And so on.) But the real joke here, are the upvotes. wtf? Edit: For the third time... :-) "Write only language" is just trolling. PBP by Conway is the standard work on layout, variable naming etc etc. It is from 2005...
- po 16y agoI left perlmonks a decade ago. I would also say I left the active community. Doesn't mean I haven't kept up with the language. Doesn't mean I haven't programmed perl in the meantime. What don't you get? You're making an attack on me about my own impression of the language because I haven't logged into a website for 10 years. Seems like if you disagreed with the substance of the post, you could have just explained it. Also, of course I have opinions just like you. I told my story. And some people liked it and upvoted. I don't get why that deserves a "wtf" other than trying to rally people to downvote me.
- deleted 16y ago[deleted]
- Samuel_Michon 16y agoFrom the article: "The iPhone isn't the highest sold smartphone" Sure it is. At least in the U.S., Japan, New Zealand and Australia. In most other countries, Nokia is the most popular smartphone vendor, but because they offer hundreds of different models, I doubt Nokia has one specific model that sells better than the iPhone 4. [U.S.] http://www.engadget.com/2010/11/01/canalys-iphone-becomes-most-popular-smartphone-in-the-us-andro/ http://www.engadget.com/2010/11/01/canalys-iphone-becomes-mo... [Australia] http://www.idc.com/about/viewpressrelease.jsp?containerId=prAU22603210§ionId=null&elementId=null&pageType=SYNOPSIS http://www.idc.com/about/viewpressrelease.jsp?containerId=pr... [New Zealand] http://computerworld.co.nz/news.nsf/telecommunications/android-knocking-on-iphones-door http://computerworld.co.nz/news.nsf/telecommunications/andro... [Japan] http://www.businessweek.com/news/2010-04-23/apple-iphone-captures-72-of-japan-smartphone-market-update3-.html http://www.businessweek.com/news/2010-04-23/apple-iphone-cap...
- flatline 16y ago'I've always wondered how those mechanism of "being THE it-language" or "the tool the cool kids use these days" or "success" in terms of "spreading everywhere" really works.' Just having CPAN isn't enough. There need to be new and interesting projects that stand on their own and are current and relevant. I'm not saying there aren't, I just don't read about them on HN, reddit, etc. Perl was always about making things easy, and it wasn't hard to see how a perl script was better than a cgi handler in C. How is writing a DSL interpreter in Perl cool compared to, say, Ruby? How do the Perl MVC frameworks make things easier/better than rails or django?
- Su-Shee 16y agoThat's totally not the point with all our languages these days - Ruby, Python, Perl - next year JavaScript will probably have a similar ecosystem of modules as we do as productive as the community writes code. Who doesn't have some amazing web framework these days?! The differences boil down to details, architecture, stability, speed, security, documentation and the like - but seriously, do you really think some route handler in _programming language_ X or Y does make _any_ difference? I personally didn't like the philosophy of RoR - I liked Merb better and got really put off by its community (and still am) and specifically by blog postings selling me shit as gold and all this "awesome <insert some simple basic not even well crafted solution to an every day problem here>" selling - but this is a matter of _taste_ and _personal preferences_ and don't really count as an argument. Of course you can write a damn DSL in Perl in any way you like - otherwise a project like Moose wouldn't even be possible which wrote an entire metaobject OO system in Perl. My point was that people usally plainly don't _know_ about those things and blindly think that PHP is the only language you can do "Web" with, Ruby the only language to write a DSL in and Python the only language well I have no idea what Python might be the only language for. ;)
- pyre 16y agoA suggestion for a Perl screencast: using the Perl debugger. ~1.5 years ago my friend found a bug in the Perl debugger that had rendered it basically non-functional for several releases. I think it's telling that no one picked up on that for so long (i.e. no one is using the Perl debugger, probably because they don't know it exists and/or how to use it). [ IIRC, it might be the bug under: http://perldoc.perl.org/perl5100delta.html http://perldoc.perl.org/perl5100delta.html ; search for 'PERLIO_DEBUG' ]
- megamark16 16y agoI learned vim over emacs because vi is installed on every linux machine I have ever touched, so when I sit down to a server and I need to edit a config file, I try vim, then I use vi, and I always find one or the other. I just opened Terminal on my Ubuntu 10.10 machine and typed "emacs" and it informed me that it wasn't installed, but was available in a slew of packages.
- kentnl 16y agoProbably a good reason to use Perl too, finding a machine without it is hard. =)
- astrofinch 16y agoI never understood this rationale for learning vim. Do you really spend a lot of your development time on random Unix boxes you and all of your friends lack root access to?
- wladimir 16y agoThese days, probably not that much, with the advent of virtualisation. But a decade ago there were a lot of shared shell servers in use with only a minimal install and a small per-user quota. So the rationale made sense...
- pmikal 16y agoHip or un-hip, ChargeSmart loves perl - developers looking for work at a San Francisco based funded payments start-up should email me their details, pmikal [at] ChargeSmart.com.
- bootload 16y ago"... Err, yeah well of course Vim is a really nice programming editor, man - why do you think we use it?! ..." traditionally because if you are on a machine with limited memory vi, vim is the only editor that will load and there is no way you will get me using 'ed' again ~ http://www.faqs.org/docs/artu/ch13s02.html#id2963445 http://www.faqs.org/docs/artu/ch13s02.html#id2963445
- alnewkirk 16y agoI guess I'll throw my hat in the ring. Perl is awesome, and since I've been using it practically my entire career and have contributed quite a substantial amount of time developing libraries for CPAN I suppose it my core-competency. Bottom line, CPAN is awesome ... but lets not be a one trick pony. When you hear things over-and-over you should probably take notice (and maybe even onus). "Perl is not newbie friendly, past or present (modern)", "Perl community is not friendly (rtfm)", "Perl is not used for the new web", "Perl has no good IDE", etc. I'd like to see Perl restored to its former glory because it is an incredibly versatile language. IMHO, I think Perl developers need to develop more purty public-facing tools, e.g. Websites, Web Apps, Desktop Apps, etc. .. see Lacuna Expanse for example. CPAN Modules are not public-facing (or are to a point) and do nothing towards altering the perception of Perl.
- rgbrgb 16y agoThis article kind of made me want to get better at Vim.
- pacemkr 16y agoI'm just getting into Ruby and converting to vim as my primary editor, and I didn't even know that this is a "hip" thing to do. All of a sudden I feel trashy for making logical choices. I think the author misjudged why people like me choose Ruby and vim -- choices that have nothing to do with each other, btw. I'm a fan of terseness and readability. Ruby has a reputation for both. I've never heard the following phrases spoken: "Perl is great for writing DSL's." "Perl is very readable." The most amazing experience has been going on GitHub on day one, reading the Rails, Haml, Sinatra, Tilt, you name it, code and being able to understand virtually any part of it. This is not only a testament to the language, but also a testament to the quality of the frameworks and the API's that are being produced with it. Show me a web framework written in Perl that I can dig into and understand with zero Perl experience. Vim, on the other hand, is a sour-sweet topic. Here is the only reason I'm using vim: everything else sucks ___. Vim also sucks ____ because in 2011 it is still a text editor that can't copy paste using the "normal people" shortcuts. I'm looking forward to the day I finally customize vim enough to match Notepad in usability. As much as vim usability sucks, I know that I can spend a year customizing it (and it will take a year) and be able to rely on it for the rest of my life. In contrast, there is no such incentive to invest into the monstrosities riding over the JVM (not calling names). Also, screencasts are great because I read all day and its tiring, physically tiring. Sitting back, relaxing my eyes and being educated while I sip on a coffee and have a cookie is my idea of fun. Screencasts are free, bite sized, training. By the author's logic Khan Academy is worthless as an educational tool because most of it is written somewhere.
- draegtun 16y agoShow me a web framework written in Perl that I can dig into and understand with zero Perl experience I think delving into any web framework with zero language experience isn't going to be easy :) However here are two Perl web frameworks which (IMHO) are easy to follow: * Mojolicious - https://github.com/kraih/mojo https://github.com/kraih/mojo * Tatsumaki - https://github.com/miyagawa/Tatsumaki https://github.com/miyagawa/Tatsumaki
- sea6ear 16y agoTry ":source mswin.vim" - I think that should give "normal" style copy/cut/paste behavior - note that "old" ctrl-v becomes ctrl-q with this change.
- xsltuser2010 16y agoMaybe you should market Perl as uncool and weird and without annoying yuppies like DHH. ;P