6 ms·

Apparently by replacing them with new horrifying surprises, if this article is any indication. Good grief, I don't miss working in Perl.

cogman10 3y ago
One person's unspeakable horror is another's creature comfort.
- fuzztester 3y ago
  De gustibus ...
fuzztester 3y ago
>Good grief, I don't miss working in Perl. Good and grief in the same sentence about the same language ... Perl. Delighted and horrified? ;-)
- throwanem 3y ago
  Delighted that the screwing around I did in high school from a copy of the Camel Book my mom got me for my birthday gave me a skill I could parlay into a job that turned into a great career. Horrified once I finally got out into the industry proper and discovered all I'd been missing. It's not that I regret ever having worked in Perl. It's just that I'm glad to have moved on to bigger and better things.
  - steelframe 3y ago
    The Windows build still had plenty of Perl in it when I worked on Windows 8.
    - throwanem 3y ago
      Given all I've heard of the Windows build process, I think this is much more an argument in support than in opposition.
pawelmurias 3y ago
Some of the Raku people think that showing of the most bizarre parts of the language makes it look good for some weird reason.
- 2colours 3y ago
  I guess that all depends on what you consider bizarre parts. You of all people must have your own weird reason to say this out of the blue, though.
  - throwanem 3y ago
    Even from the perspective of long familiarity with Perl 5, the parts of Raku on show in this article are pretty damn bizarre. Maybe not by the standards of the Raku community, granted - but if this by them is ordinary, all the more reason for me to want to stay away.
    - 2colours 3y ago
      It would be invaluable feedback if you could point out what you find so bizarre? I mean, the "let's define some ad-hoc postcircumfix operator" is a weird flex for sure but otherwise? I could only see basic non-magic subroutine definitions and appropriately used operators.
      - throwanem 3y ago
        Where would you like me to start? The apparent variance between list syntax accepted by the reader and emitted by the printer, the brambly thicket of special-case operators and grammars ('o' for function composition? Square brackets to reduce over an operator? Square brackets with a backslash to map? - I remember the "Periodic Table of the Operators", but even by that standard this is wild), function signatures as first-class values (...what?) But honestly, I don't think I can provide actually useful feedback here, because I'm pretty sure nothing I'm doing is similar enough to anything Raku is doing for the conversation to really make sense. Everything I've just described, and much else about the language, strikes me very much as needless complication for the sake of complication, the sort of thing that earned Perl 5 its "write-only language" sobriquet by encouraging, if not necessitating, the development of idiolects among its users - and Raku if anything seems to do much more of this than Perl 5 ever did. That's not actually a bad thing for a small codebase maintained by one programmer, for whom the high cognitive complexity imposed by the language design can be managed by mostly working within their idiolect. But my experience has been that the maintainability of such a codebase decreases as at least the square of the number of people working on it, and that quickly becomes a catastrophe in the sorts of very large codebases, shared among tens or hundreds of engineers, in which I've spent the bulk of the last decade working. That's not a world in which I see Raku being able to survive, and my experience there has led me to value languages and practices that are actively as un-clever as possible - because the cleverer something is, the harder to understand, which becomes a real problem when understanding it is necessary to resolve an outage denying service to millions of users. That's also not a world in which I would expect Raku to try to survive, because it's obvious to me that that's not what Raku is meant for. Nor should it be; that that's not the place for such carefree, freewheeling weirdness for weirdness' sake isn't the same as saying no such place exists. It's just that that's a place I'm glad I don't live any more.

cogman10 3y ago

One person's unspeakable horror is another's creature comfort.

fuzztester 3y ago
De gustibus ...

fuzztester 3y ago

>Good grief, I don't miss working in Perl. Good and grief in the same sentence about the same language ... Perl. Delighted and horrified? ;-)

throwanem 3y ago
Delighted that the screwing around I did in high school from a copy of the Camel Book my mom got me for my birthday gave me a skill I could parlay into a job that turned into a great career. Horrified once I finally got out into the industry proper and discovered all I'd been missing. It's not that I regret ever having worked in Perl. It's just that I'm glad to have moved on to bigger and better things.
- steelframe 3y ago
  The Windows build still had plenty of Perl in it when I worked on Windows 8.
  - throwanem 3y ago
    Given all I've heard of the Windows build process, I think this is much more an argument in support than in opposition.

pawelmurias 3y ago

Some of the Raku people think that showing of the most bizarre parts of the language makes it look good for some weird reason.

2colours 3y ago
I guess that all depends on what you consider bizarre parts. You of all people must have your own weird reason to say this out of the blue, though.
- throwanem 3y ago
  Even from the perspective of long familiarity with Perl 5, the parts of Raku on show in this article are pretty damn bizarre. Maybe not by the standards of the Raku community, granted - but if this by them is ordinary, all the more reason for me to want to stay away.
  - 2colours 3y ago
    It would be invaluable feedback if you could point out what you find so bizarre? I mean, the "let's define some ad-hoc postcircumfix operator" is a weird flex for sure but otherwise? I could only see basic non-magic subroutine definitions and appropriately used operators.
    - throwanem 3y ago
      Where would you like me to start? The apparent variance between list syntax accepted by the reader and emitted by the printer, the brambly thicket of special-case operators and grammars ('o' for function composition? Square brackets to reduce over an operator? Square brackets with a backslash to map? - I remember the "Periodic Table of the Operators", but even by that standard this is wild), function signatures as first-class values (...what?) But honestly, I don't think I can provide actually useful feedback here, because I'm pretty sure nothing I'm doing is similar enough to anything Raku is doing for the conversation to really make sense. Everything I've just described, and much else about the language, strikes me very much as needless complication for the sake of complication, the sort of thing that earned Perl 5 its "write-only language" sobriquet by encouraging, if not necessitating, the development of idiolects among its users - and Raku if anything seems to do much more of this than Perl 5 ever did. That's not actually a bad thing for a small codebase maintained by one programmer, for whom the high cognitive complexity imposed by the language design can be managed by mostly working within their idiolect. But my experience has been that the maintainability of such a codebase decreases as at least the square of the number of people working on it, and that quickly becomes a catastrophe in the sorts of very large codebases, shared among tens or hundreds of engineers, in which I've spent the bulk of the last decade working. That's not a world in which I see Raku being able to survive, and my experience there has led me to value languages and practices that are actively as un-clever as possible - because the cleverer something is, the harder to understand, which becomes a real problem when understanding it is necessary to resolve an outage denying service to millions of users. That's also not a world in which I would expect Raku to try to survive, because it's obvious to me that that's not what Raku is meant for. Nor should it be; that that's not the place for such carefree, freewheeling weirdness for weirdness' sake isn't the same as saying no such place exists. It's just that that's a place I'm glad I don't live any more.