5 ms·

Can Lisp do What Perl Does Easily?

25 points by omouse 19y ago

Erik Naggum on why Perl sucks :D

sgraham 19y ago
The only concrete assertions I see there are that regular expressions are error-prone (fine, if you really think so, don't use them), and that data in Perl aren't s-expressions (I'm assuming that's what he's ranting about when he's implying that all Perl is good for is massaging input formats). So pretty weak: CPAN is the supreme, far-and-away, no-other-reason-or-language-comes-close (at least in 2000) to use Perl.
- lupin_sansei 19y ago
  Yes CPAN is perl's best kept secret. There's still nothing to touch it.
SwellJoe 19y ago
Note the date. In 2000, Perl was, by far, the leading scripting language (and language for the web). I'm certain that if this rant were written today, it would target PHP, and possibly even Ruby and Python. Ironically, perhaps, modern Perl is more lisp-like than any other mainstream language (aside from JavaScript, in some ways), and so this article merely says, "Mainstream languages that come pretty close to Lisp are brain-damaged and you'd have to be a particular breed of crazy to use it for anything."
- shiro 19y ago
  I love his rant. There are so many colorful expressions in it that even if you don't agree with what he says, you can enjoy how he says it. Here's another my favorite, Erik on C++, from 1998: http://groups.google.com/group/comp.lang.lisp/msg/917737b7cc8510e3 http://groups.google.com/group/comp.lang.lisp/msg/917737b7cc...
  - SwellJoe 19y ago
    Awesome. He's convinced that using a language (C++ or Perl, depending on the rant in question) can cause damage to ones cognitive processes! He is a colorful one. I'm pretty sure I'd feel dumber after having worked in PHP for the past six months on our new website, if that were true.
    - brlewis 19y ago
      No, if you were succumbing to the trap he described about Perl, then you would feel smarter for having solved so many immediate problems.
  - sandoh 19y ago
    "I actually think C++ is ideal only for programmers without any ethics." This guy is a little bit extreme.
- omouse 19y ago
  and so this article merely says, "Mainstream languages that come pretty close to Lisp are brain-damaged and you'd have to be a particular breed of crazy to use it for anything." Wrong. This reddit comment nailed it: http://programming.reddit.com/info/2mm0n/comments/c2mo30 http://programming.reddit.com/info/2mm0n/comments/c2mo30 Erik's argument is that Perl incentivizes The Wrong Way, and disincentivizes The Right Way. It's not about coercion, it's about incentives. "it's not that perl programmers are idiots, it's that the language rewards idiotic behavior in a way that no other language or tool has ever done." --jemfinch
  - SwellJoe 19y ago
    "Wrong." Very concise. And it's always good to back it up with the assertions of some random dude on Reddit.
    - omouse 19y ago
      The assertation is backed up by a quote from the original post by Naggum. I said "wrong" because you somehow missed that part of his post. He was not saying that Perl is wrong because it has some of Lisp's features. He was saying that it is wrong because it allows shitty work. In fact, it encourages it by making it harder to write good solutions. Someone (Perl) can be beautiful (Lisp features), but that doesn't change the fact that they wear dirty clothing (ugly syntax) and they smell kind of funny (ugly solutions).
      - SwellJoe 19y ago
        "The assertation is backed up by a quote from the original post by Naggum." An ill-informed rant from a crank is not the same as "backed up". "Someone (Perl) can be beautiful (Lisp features), but that doesn't change the fact that they wear dirty clothing (ugly syntax) and they smell kind of funny (ugly solutions)." We all have our preferences. While you can quote your favorite usenet crank from years ago, I can quote one of my favorites about Lisp (doesn't mean Lisp isn't a great language for many tasks...this quote just makes me laugh every time I read it): "Lisp has all the visual appeal of oatmeal with fingernail clippings mixed in." --Larry Wall (larry@wall.org) Smart people can disagree on many things. Programming languages are no different.
- lupin_sansei 19y ago
  > In 2000, Perl was, by far, the leading scripting language (and language for the web). It still is (excepting PHP) http://www.tiobe.com/tpci.htm http://www.tiobe.com/tpci.htm
- Goladus 19y ago
  In what ways is Perl Lisp-like? The more I learn Lisp, the less it seems like Perl at all.
  - SwellJoe 19y ago
    Perhaps learning more Perl would solve that problem.
    - Goladus 19y ago
      Perhaps you could give me a brief summary (a few sentences) about what you mean regarding Perl's similarly to Lisp. I may simply be paying attention to different things.
      - Goladus 19y ago
        In the meantime, here are a few of the differences I've observed: Perl flattens lists by default. All subroutine parameters are passed via @_, resulting in an imperative-style parsing of variables at the beginning of every sub. A perl program is a file of perl statements, a lisp program is a lisp list of expressions. Perl has contexts. (edit) Also, Lisp reserves almost no characters. I can use square-bracket as a symbol name if I want.
        SwellJoe 19y ago
        "Perl flattens lists by default." Perl has several data types. You can get all the unflattened goodness you want by passing array refs. We do it all the time in our code. It's merely syntax. "All subroutine parameters are passed via @_, resulting in an imperative-style parsing of variables at the beginning of every sub." Likewise, pass an array ref, and you don't fiddle with parsing @_. TMTOWTDI. (Note that I'm not suggesting passing array refs for everyone or all subroutines...it's just a somewhat lispy way of thinking. In OO development, a more "imperative-style" is appropriate, and we use that too.) "A perl program is a file of perl statements, a lisp program is a lisp list of expressions." OK. Wonderful. Nonetheless, you have first-class functions in Perl. Currying is possible (and not terribly ugly) in Perl. Closures exist in Perl. Macros do not, yet, exist in Perl 5. But they exist in Perl 6. That's the only significant gap I'm aware of (where "significant" means, "a concept that cannot be replicated in the language without huge, long-winded, hacks"). Syntax is arbitrary, and smart people can disagree on what good syntax looks like. Power is a bit more tangible, and on the power continuum Perl holds up just fine. "Perl has contexts." So? Merely syntax. "Also, Lisp reserves almost no characters. I can use square-bracket as a symbol name if I want." Again, so? I'm talking about power, you're talking about implementation and syntax preferences. You may feel that the beauty of Lisp is in the details, and that's wonderful. I think Lisp is nifty, too. But, there is also beauty in speed of development, and nothing is faster to develop than already written code. Perl has the largest collection of free pre-written functionality of any modern language in CPAN. It also happens that for my problem domain (system administration automation) Perl is effectively already a nearly ideal DSL. For me, built-in grep and map and file tests and operations and regular expressions and taint mode and efficient hash tables and native Unicode and cheap enough concurrency and lots and lots of libraries are all killer features and Perl has all of them. Sure, Lisp has a better map, by some definition of better, and I can pull in a regex library and probably a POSIX file library. Erlang has better concurrency by all definitions. Other languages are strong in other areas. But nothing has them all...except Perl. The nice thing is that we can both use our favorite languages for anything we want. I will never come over to your house and force you to write (or read!) Perl code. I promise. I do think folks are missing out on some interesting ideas by closing their eyes and going "neener neener neener neener" with fingers in their ears every time someone mentions Perl, but that's no business of mine.
aston 19y ago
the unemployed programmer had a problem. "I know", said the programmer, "I'll just learn perl." the unemployed programmer now had two problems. One of the best programming quotes. Ever.
- SwellJoe 19y ago
  It was better the first couple hundred times I heard it. Jamie Zawinski's from 1997 is the most famous in modern times: "Some people, when confronted with a problem, think "I know, I'll use regular expressions." Now they have two problems." But, it dates back even further to a "D. Tilbrook" from before 1988: "Whenever faced with a problem, some people say `Lets use AWK.' Now, they have two problems." There's an XML variant that had quite a lot of popularity in the early 00's.
  - omouse 19y ago
    It's funny because they're all accurate. XML is an ugly beast, regular expressions can be amazingly obfuscated. I don't know about AWK, but I'm guessing that it's as ugly as Perl.
    - vikram 19y ago
      AWK is no where near as complicated as perl. It'll probably take someone 1/2 hour to figure it out.
    - SwellJoe 19y ago
      Brian Kernighan created Awk. And who are you again? You've misunderstood the fundamental UNIX nature of these quotes. They are said by people who use the tools in question regularly. jwz doesn't avoid regular expressions for everything (he'd be a fool to do so, and he's no fool)...he's merely pointing out that regexes can be misused, and often are. Likewise Awk. By cloistering yourself into Lisp, and nothing but, you're missing out on years of aggregate wisdom from some of the smartest people in computing. Lisp is one of those really valuable pieces of wisdom. But it is not the only one, or even the most important. Deny yourself the rest of the history of computing, and you are doomed to reimplement it...and you'll almost certainly do it poorly.
epi0Bauqu 19y ago
The date should really be noted in the title of the post.
- omouse 19y ago
  Why?
  - SwellJoe 19y ago
    Because the ranter was pissed that his favorite language was not very viable commercially, and a language he strongly dislikes was the most popular language on the web, with many job opportunities. Bitterness colors his logic.
  - epi0Bauqu 19y ago
    Two reasons: First, everything has context and time is often a big part of it. Setting that context up for people is helpful. Second, this site is entitled Hacker News and this is not News. While people will argue old things should still be included, and that's fine, I think old things should at least be marked as such by putting the year of publication next to them.
epi0Bauqu 19y ago
For Web stuff, I pretty much exclusively program in Perl and JavaScript when left on my own. I like both a lot. I really don't get the anti-Perl reputation as portrayed in this article, although as noted it is really old. Maybe it's just my Perl code, but I can pick up code from 10 years ago and understand it fine, and my Perl code never seems to gets out of hand as described in this rant. You always have wonder with rants what the author was actually doing...
- whacked_new 19y ago
  I don't think any particular language causes brain damage like some more strongly-opinioned people would say. But some make it easier to write nutty code. It doesn't mean everybody writes nutty code. Just like how being surrounded by junk food predisposes you to poor dietary habits and possibly in consequence, heart problems, it's not impossible to eat healthy and stay fit. Shunning the environment/language/tool is understandable, but equating it to the root of the problem always involves some exaggeration. The NASA code released not long ago had GOTOs in it and I don't think it costed lives.
- Goladus 19y ago
  The author of that rant is a purist. He believes that if everyone would slow down, learn Lisp values and implement them in their code, so that eventually they, and perhaps more importantly the next generation will be far better able to focus on essential difficulties rather than incidental ones. His argument is that perl programmers are all busy solving immediate problems that would have never been problems to begin with if everyone had been using Lisp the way it was meant to be used. And they're often not solving problems in Lisp-fashion.
lupin_sansei 19y ago
These ranters never actually show you any perl code that is particularly ugly and compare it against some lisp/python/ruby code that solves the problem more cleanly. I'm sure that there are areas where other languages' solutions are much cleaner than an equivalent perl one, but can anybody actually show us one? Especially a lisp one.
- SwellJoe 19y ago
  pg wrote a few in an essay. (And, unremarkably, though I'm going to remark on it anyway, Perl stands up as well as any other mainstream language to the onslaught. Perl 6 does even better, though I think one of the biggest side effects of Perl 6 is going to be a huge influx of Haskell coders because of Pugs.)
  - edu 19y ago
    And when will be Perl 6 ready?
    - lupin_sansei 19y ago
      The day before Arc comes out.
      - edu 19y ago
        Heh, that's a good one :D
    - SwellJoe 19y ago
      Possibly by Christmas. Many of us are already using it with Pugs.
- lupin_sansei 19y ago
  Wow not a single example!
snorkel 19y ago
He sounds a tad disgruntled about his past jobs. He didn't answer the question "can lisp do what perl does easily?" because the answer is no: http://weitz.de/cl-ppcre/ http://weitz.de/cl-ppcre/
herdrick 19y ago
Wow - I use a lisp, but this argument is awful. Saying you can really quickly whip up something that works in Perl is an overwhelming recommendation. That the subsequent code in unmaintainable is a relatively tiny disadvantage. From the linked-to post: "...the language rewards idiotic behavior... you can commit any dirty hack in a few minutes in perl, but you can't write an elegant, maintainabale program..." Sound familiar? That's the mating call of statically typed language programmer and the top-down 'software architect'. That's bad. And I'll admit, Scheme's libraries (I use Scheme) are in practice somewhat statically typed and fussy, which sucks. I've never used Perl - maybe I should. BTW, is Ruby really just as good for quick 'duct tape' work and hacks? My very limited experience with Ruby made me think it was good, but not extraordinarily handy.
herdrick 19y ago
'Maintainability' is the last refuge of the fussy language.

25 points by omouse 19y ago

Erik Naggum on why Perl sucks :D

The only concrete assertions I see there are that regular expressions are error-prone (fine, if you really think so, don't use them), and that data in Perl aren't s-expressions (I'm assuming that's what he's ranting about when he's implying that all Perl is good for is massaging input formats). So pretty weak: CPAN is the supreme, far-and-away, no-other-reason-or-language-comes-close (at least in 2000) to use Perl.

lupin_sansei 19y ago
Yes CPAN is perl's best kept secret. There's still nothing to touch it.

SwellJoe 19y ago

Note the date. In 2000, Perl was, by far, the leading scripting language (and language for the web). I'm certain that if this rant were written today, it would target PHP, and possibly even Ruby and Python. Ironically, perhaps, modern Perl is more lisp-like than any other mainstream language (aside from JavaScript, in some ways), and so this article merely says, "Mainstream languages that come pretty close to Lisp are brain-damaged and you'd have to be a particular breed of crazy to use it for anything."

shiro 19y ago
I love his rant. There are so many colorful expressions in it that even if you don't agree with what he says, you can enjoy how he says it. Here's another my favorite, Erik on C++, from 1998: http://groups.google.com/group/comp.lang.lisp/msg/917737b7cc8510e3 http://groups.google.com/group/comp.lang.lisp/msg/917737b7cc...
- SwellJoe 19y ago
  Awesome. He's convinced that using a language (C++ or Perl, depending on the rant in question) can cause damage to ones cognitive processes! He is a colorful one. I'm pretty sure I'd feel dumber after having worked in PHP for the past six months on our new website, if that were true.
  - brlewis 19y ago
    No, if you were succumbing to the trap he described about Perl, then you would feel smarter for having solved so many immediate problems.
- sandoh 19y ago
  "I actually think C++ is ideal only for programmers without any ethics." This guy is a little bit extreme.
omouse 19y ago
and so this article merely says, "Mainstream languages that come pretty close to Lisp are brain-damaged and you'd have to be a particular breed of crazy to use it for anything." Wrong. This reddit comment nailed it: http://programming.reddit.com/info/2mm0n/comments/c2mo30 http://programming.reddit.com/info/2mm0n/comments/c2mo30 Erik's argument is that Perl incentivizes The Wrong Way, and disincentivizes The Right Way. It's not about coercion, it's about incentives. "it's not that perl programmers are idiots, it's that the language rewards idiotic behavior in a way that no other language or tool has ever done." --jemfinch
- SwellJoe 19y ago
  "Wrong." Very concise. And it's always good to back it up with the assertions of some random dude on Reddit.
  - omouse 19y ago
    The assertation is backed up by a quote from the original post by Naggum. I said "wrong" because you somehow missed that part of his post. He was not saying that Perl is wrong because it has some of Lisp's features. He was saying that it is wrong because it allows shitty work. In fact, it encourages it by making it harder to write good solutions. Someone (Perl) can be beautiful (Lisp features), but that doesn't change the fact that they wear dirty clothing (ugly syntax) and they smell kind of funny (ugly solutions).
    - SwellJoe 19y ago
      "The assertation is backed up by a quote from the original post by Naggum." An ill-informed rant from a crank is not the same as "backed up". "Someone (Perl) can be beautiful (Lisp features), but that doesn't change the fact that they wear dirty clothing (ugly syntax) and they smell kind of funny (ugly solutions)." We all have our preferences. While you can quote your favorite usenet crank from years ago, I can quote one of my favorites about Lisp (doesn't mean Lisp isn't a great language for many tasks...this quote just makes me laugh every time I read it): "Lisp has all the visual appeal of oatmeal with fingernail clippings mixed in." --Larry Wall (larry@wall.org) Smart people can disagree on many things. Programming languages are no different.
lupin_sansei 19y ago
> In 2000, Perl was, by far, the leading scripting language (and language for the web). It still is (excepting PHP) http://www.tiobe.com/tpci.htm http://www.tiobe.com/tpci.htm
Goladus 19y ago
In what ways is Perl Lisp-like? The more I learn Lisp, the less it seems like Perl at all.
- SwellJoe 19y ago
  Perhaps learning more Perl would solve that problem.
  - Goladus 19y ago
    Perhaps you could give me a brief summary (a few sentences) about what you mean regarding Perl's similarly to Lisp. I may simply be paying attention to different things.
    - Goladus 19y ago
      In the meantime, here are a few of the differences I've observed: Perl flattens lists by default. All subroutine parameters are passed via @_, resulting in an imperative-style parsing of variables at the beginning of every sub. A perl program is a file of perl statements, a lisp program is a lisp list of expressions. Perl has contexts. (edit) Also, Lisp reserves almost no characters. I can use square-bracket as a symbol name if I want.
      - SwellJoe 19y ago
        "Perl flattens lists by default." Perl has several data types. You can get all the unflattened goodness you want by passing array refs. We do it all the time in our code. It's merely syntax. "All subroutine parameters are passed via @_, resulting in an imperative-style parsing of variables at the beginning of every sub." Likewise, pass an array ref, and you don't fiddle with parsing @_. TMTOWTDI. (Note that I'm not suggesting passing array refs for everyone or all subroutines...it's just a somewhat lispy way of thinking. In OO development, a more "imperative-style" is appropriate, and we use that too.) "A perl program is a file of perl statements, a lisp program is a lisp list of expressions." OK. Wonderful. Nonetheless, you have first-class functions in Perl. Currying is possible (and not terribly ugly) in Perl. Closures exist in Perl. Macros do not, yet, exist in Perl 5. But they exist in Perl 6. That's the only significant gap I'm aware of (where "significant" means, "a concept that cannot be replicated in the language without huge, long-winded, hacks"). Syntax is arbitrary, and smart people can disagree on what good syntax looks like. Power is a bit more tangible, and on the power continuum Perl holds up just fine. "Perl has contexts." So? Merely syntax. "Also, Lisp reserves almost no characters. I can use square-bracket as a symbol name if I want." Again, so? I'm talking about power, you're talking about implementation and syntax preferences. You may feel that the beauty of Lisp is in the details, and that's wonderful. I think Lisp is nifty, too. But, there is also beauty in speed of development, and nothing is faster to develop than already written code. Perl has the largest collection of free pre-written functionality of any modern language in CPAN. It also happens that for my problem domain (system administration automation) Perl is effectively already a nearly ideal DSL. For me, built-in grep and map and file tests and operations and regular expressions and taint mode and efficient hash tables and native Unicode and cheap enough concurrency and lots and lots of libraries are all killer features and Perl has all of them. Sure, Lisp has a better map, by some definition of better, and I can pull in a regex library and probably a POSIX file library. Erlang has better concurrency by all definitions. Other languages are strong in other areas. But nothing has them all...except Perl. The nice thing is that we can both use our favorite languages for anything we want. I will never come over to your house and force you to write (or read!) Perl code. I promise. I do think folks are missing out on some interesting ideas by closing their eyes and going "neener neener neener neener" with fingers in their ears every time someone mentions Perl, but that's no business of mine.

aston 19y ago

the unemployed programmer had a problem. "I know", said the programmer, "I'll just learn perl." the unemployed programmer now had two problems. One of the best programming quotes. Ever.

SwellJoe 19y ago
It was better the first couple hundred times I heard it. Jamie Zawinski's from 1997 is the most famous in modern times: "Some people, when confronted with a problem, think "I know, I'll use regular expressions." Now they have two problems." But, it dates back even further to a "D. Tilbrook" from before 1988: "Whenever faced with a problem, some people say `Lets use AWK.' Now, they have two problems." There's an XML variant that had quite a lot of popularity in the early 00's.
- omouse 19y ago
  It's funny because they're all accurate. XML is an ugly beast, regular expressions can be amazingly obfuscated. I don't know about AWK, but I'm guessing that it's as ugly as Perl.
  - vikram 19y ago
    AWK is no where near as complicated as perl. It'll probably take someone 1/2 hour to figure it out.
  - SwellJoe 19y ago
    Brian Kernighan created Awk. And who are you again? You've misunderstood the fundamental UNIX nature of these quotes. They are said by people who use the tools in question regularly. jwz doesn't avoid regular expressions for everything (he'd be a fool to do so, and he's no fool)...he's merely pointing out that regexes can be misused, and often are. Likewise Awk. By cloistering yourself into Lisp, and nothing but, you're missing out on years of aggregate wisdom from some of the smartest people in computing. Lisp is one of those really valuable pieces of wisdom. But it is not the only one, or even the most important. Deny yourself the rest of the history of computing, and you are doomed to reimplement it...and you'll almost certainly do it poorly.

epi0Bauqu 19y ago

The date should really be noted in the title of the post.

omouse 19y ago
Why?
- SwellJoe 19y ago
  Because the ranter was pissed that his favorite language was not very viable commercially, and a language he strongly dislikes was the most popular language on the web, with many job opportunities. Bitterness colors his logic.
- epi0Bauqu 19y ago
  Two reasons: First, everything has context and time is often a big part of it. Setting that context up for people is helpful. Second, this site is entitled Hacker News and this is not News. While people will argue old things should still be included, and that's fine, I think old things should at least be marked as such by putting the year of publication next to them.

epi0Bauqu 19y ago

For Web stuff, I pretty much exclusively program in Perl and JavaScript when left on my own. I like both a lot. I really don't get the anti-Perl reputation as portrayed in this article, although as noted it is really old. Maybe it's just my Perl code, but I can pick up code from 10 years ago and understand it fine, and my Perl code never seems to gets out of hand as described in this rant. You always have wonder with rants what the author was actually doing...

whacked_new 19y ago
I don't think any particular language causes brain damage like some more strongly-opinioned people would say. But some make it easier to write nutty code. It doesn't mean everybody writes nutty code. Just like how being surrounded by junk food predisposes you to poor dietary habits and possibly in consequence, heart problems, it's not impossible to eat healthy and stay fit. Shunning the environment/language/tool is understandable, but equating it to the root of the problem always involves some exaggeration. The NASA code released not long ago had GOTOs in it and I don't think it costed lives.
Goladus 19y ago
The author of that rant is a purist. He believes that if everyone would slow down, learn Lisp values and implement them in their code, so that eventually they, and perhaps more importantly the next generation will be far better able to focus on essential difficulties rather than incidental ones. His argument is that perl programmers are all busy solving immediate problems that would have never been problems to begin with if everyone had been using Lisp the way it was meant to be used. And they're often not solving problems in Lisp-fashion.

lupin_sansei 19y ago

These ranters never actually show you any perl code that is particularly ugly and compare it against some lisp/python/ruby code that solves the problem more cleanly. I'm sure that there are areas where other languages' solutions are much cleaner than an equivalent perl one, but can anybody actually show us one? Especially a lisp one.

SwellJoe 19y ago
pg wrote a few in an essay. (And, unremarkably, though I'm going to remark on it anyway, Perl stands up as well as any other mainstream language to the onslaught. Perl 6 does even better, though I think one of the biggest side effects of Perl 6 is going to be a huge influx of Haskell coders because of Pugs.)
- edu 19y ago
  And when will be Perl 6 ready?
  - lupin_sansei 19y ago
    The day before Arc comes out.
    - edu 19y ago
      Heh, that's a good one :D
  - SwellJoe 19y ago
    Possibly by Christmas. Many of us are already using it with Pugs.
lupin_sansei 19y ago
Wow not a single example!

snorkel 19y ago

He sounds a tad disgruntled about his past jobs. He didn't answer the question "can lisp do what perl does easily?" because the answer is no: http://weitz.de/cl-ppcre/ http://weitz.de/cl-ppcre/

herdrick 19y ago

Wow - I use a lisp, but this argument is awful. Saying you can really quickly whip up something that works in Perl is an overwhelming recommendation. That the subsequent code in unmaintainable is a relatively tiny disadvantage. From the linked-to post: "...the language rewards idiotic behavior... you can commit any dirty hack in a few minutes in perl, but you can't write an elegant, maintainabale program..." Sound familiar? That's the mating call of statically typed language programmer and the top-down 'software architect'. That's bad. And I'll admit, Scheme's libraries (I use Scheme) are in practice somewhat statically typed and fussy, which sucks. I've never used Perl - maybe I should. BTW, is Ruby really just as good for quick 'duct tape' work and hacks? My very limited experience with Ruby made me think it was good, but not extraordinarily handy.

herdrick 19y ago

'Maintainability' is the last refuge of the fussy language.