5 ms·
Why only things like these float up to the front page, and not elegant and/or wholesome things written in Perl?
by WesolyKubeczek 5y ago
Why only things like these float up to the front page, and not elegant and/or wholesome things written in Perl?
- JohnHaugeland 5y agopossibly because no such thing exists
- recrof 5y agobecause of your taste of perl syntax? that's only thing that makes it different from any other scripting language.
- gerikson 5y agoPerl is like life - it contains both good and bad. And good things in Perl don't get noticed because they Just Work.
- layer8 5y agoRight, it’s elegant Perl that would be newsworthy, not gruesome Perl. (Tongue-in-cheek, I’m actually rather partial to Perl.)
- sundarurfriend 5y agoBecause with its declining popularity, most people here are unfamiliar with the language except for its meme status as "that weird line noise language". Things that confirm pre-existing beliefs are easy to accept and upvote, whereas good Perl code would require (a) some actual thinking, and (b) challenging the socially accepted narrative - both of which are relatively much harder.
- WesolyKubeczek 5y agoGood Perl code would also look pretty boring, almost like enterprise Java. I'd wager that all code that "just works", in any language, looks bland and predictable. But I'd rather have that than cute and clever any day.
- anthk 5y agoGood Perl looks like a mix between structured SH and a dumbed down C with no pointers. Boring, as you say. But it works.
- hnick 5y agoYou say that but a lot of people just can't get over the sigils.
- sundarurfriend 5y agoAnd a lot of people just can't get over significant whitespace, and curly braces, and lispy parantheses, and semicolons. No syntax can please everyone, especially so with people unfamiliar with the language they're looking at.
- anthk 5y agoTrue, most Gen-Z ers know nil. First they should try Perl as if it was a tuned up AWK, and then, read the Orelly Perl books as if they were a religion. https://docstore.mik.ua/orelly/perl4/index.htm https://docstore.mik.ua/orelly/perl4/index.htm
- kqr 5y agoAfaik Perl is not declining in popularity, it's just not growing in popularity as fast as many other languages, so it's market share shrinks while the number of users it has grows.
- lanstin 5y agoI loathe perl still (based on having to SSH (or telnet?) into people's systems and debug their perl scripts in the 90s) but, Higher Order Perl, https://hop.perl.plover.com/ https://hop.perl.plover.com/ is a truly excellent introduction to the power of functions that generate functions, more accessible and more immediately useful than Paul Graham's On Lisp. The lessons are immediately applicable at least to Javascript and Python. Strongly typed things like Go make it a bit more work, but still you'll understand why the work is worth doing.
- maximus-decimus 5y agoThe other day, I wanted to check if a text file's 100,000th word was being indexed, so I generated a text file with 99,999 lines containing "foo" and one line with "bar" with this line in bash perl -e 'print "foo\n" for 1..99999; print "bar\n";' > foobar.txt
- 77pt77 5y agoBecause prominent figures like the author of the snippet push these gotchas as virtues.