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I'm bashing Perl because I'm using it daily today. I have the moral right. People waxing poetic about their time using Perl back in the late 1990s/early 2000s

I'm bashing Perl because I'm using it daily today. I have the moral right. People waxing poetic about their time using Perl back in the late 1990s/early 2000s don't have a vote because they clung onto good bits and have long forgotten the ugly. > it really makes Stream-of-Conscious programming the norm Are you sure it's a Good Thing? Really sure? What if you have teammates? What if you have a life? What if you need to revise your stream of consciousness after a year? Still sure?

alfiedotwtf 3y ago
I still use Perl, maybe not daily but yes to weekly, so I have still have skin in the game. Yes I'm sure.
- WesolyKubeczek 3y ago
  Do you develop with Perl collaboratively with teammates?
  - alfiedotwtf 3y ago
    Not anymore, but I’ve probably worked on the largest Perl code bases in the world, so again… I’m not a Perl noob
  - merlynkline 3y ago
    Last year I finished over a decade on very large Perl project, collaborating within a team. When I joined that project it was already over a decade old a most of the code was much like what you are probably imagining. When I left the project, all the parts we had touched were much like any other high quality modern codebase, and we could almost as readily maintain the decade-old parts (that we had worked on) as the week-old parts. Having worked in many languages over many decades, I've learned that a high quality codebase is built by high quality developers, largely independent of the languages they use. You can build an unmaintainable mess in any language as easily as you can build a high quality codebase in Perl. I would concede that you can more easily build an unmaintainable mess in Perl than in many languages but that's up to you; you can do most things more easily in Perl than in many languages ;)
    - singingfish 3y ago
      The advantage of bad perl is that it pretty much is immediately obvious on first sight that it's bad perl. Compare with python, it takes thought and time to identify bad python because it's so syntacticly bland.
      - WesolyKubeczek 3y ago
        With python, write enough of it and you'll be able to spot bad python code just fine. If I don't have Perl muscle memory exercised enough, the same problem telling good and bad Perl code exists too, but it's the other way around — it's all bad until proved otherwise.
ukuina 3y ago
I have written Perl solo, and then migrated that Perl into a team setting, and the mindset shift needed is HUGE. I agree with you. The happy medium is to write your program twice: Write it solo in Perl for rapid thought-to-code, figuring out architectural issues along the way. Then, write it again in Python for scalable collaboration using the revised architecture. This gives you a working solution for the problem FAST and adheres to "Do it, then do it right". Unfortunately, this doesn't scale to systems. I do hope LLM-driven transmogrification becomes a real thing.
- runlaszlorun 3y ago
  I’ve never done Perl but would writing solo in Perl and then rewriting it again in Perl with a team be an option? I have an affection for both Forth and Lisp, two languages that have also been called highly productive but write only. I think a working early version- even if its a spreadsheet- is 10x of a supposedly 80% done version of something else. The latter of which I must now return to unfortunately…
rabbiveesh 3y ago
I'm currently writing perl with a team, and I find that so long as you write in a way that looks good, there's no issue with other people reading the code either. And that still happens at stream-of-conciousness.

alfiedotwtf 3y ago

I still use Perl, maybe not daily but yes to weekly, so I have still have skin in the game. Yes I'm sure.

WesolyKubeczek 3y ago
Do you develop with Perl collaboratively with teammates?
- alfiedotwtf 3y ago
  Not anymore, but I’ve probably worked on the largest Perl code bases in the world, so again… I’m not a Perl noob
- merlynkline 3y ago
  Last year I finished over a decade on very large Perl project, collaborating within a team. When I joined that project it was already over a decade old a most of the code was much like what you are probably imagining. When I left the project, all the parts we had touched were much like any other high quality modern codebase, and we could almost as readily maintain the decade-old parts (that we had worked on) as the week-old parts. Having worked in many languages over many decades, I've learned that a high quality codebase is built by high quality developers, largely independent of the languages they use. You can build an unmaintainable mess in any language as easily as you can build a high quality codebase in Perl. I would concede that you can more easily build an unmaintainable mess in Perl than in many languages but that's up to you; you can do most things more easily in Perl than in many languages ;)
  - singingfish 3y ago
    The advantage of bad perl is that it pretty much is immediately obvious on first sight that it's bad perl. Compare with python, it takes thought and time to identify bad python because it's so syntacticly bland.
    - WesolyKubeczek 3y ago
      With python, write enough of it and you'll be able to spot bad python code just fine. If I don't have Perl muscle memory exercised enough, the same problem telling good and bad Perl code exists too, but it's the other way around — it's all bad until proved otherwise.

ukuina 3y ago

I have written Perl solo, and then migrated that Perl into a team setting, and the mindset shift needed is HUGE. I agree with you. The happy medium is to write your program twice: Write it solo in Perl for rapid thought-to-code, figuring out architectural issues along the way. Then, write it again in Python for scalable collaboration using the revised architecture. This gives you a working solution for the problem FAST and adheres to "Do it, then do it right". Unfortunately, this doesn't scale to systems. I do hope LLM-driven transmogrification becomes a real thing.

runlaszlorun 3y ago
I’ve never done Perl but would writing solo in Perl and then rewriting it again in Perl with a team be an option? I have an affection for both Forth and Lisp, two languages that have also been called highly productive but write only. I think a working early version- even if its a spreadsheet- is 10x of a supposedly 80% done version of something else. The latter of which I must now return to unfortunately…

rabbiveesh 3y ago

I'm currently writing perl with a team, and I find that so long as you write in a way that looks good, there's no issue with other people reading the code either. And that still happens at stream-of-conciousness.