10 ms·

Perl - the Detroit of scripting languages

72 points by petepete 13y ago

guylhem 13y ago
In perl5 : - I can have a prototype running in a matter of minutes - I have access to a vast library of modules doing everything I need (which helps the former) - I write quick and efficient code Do I really care about what other people think about the languages and tools I use? No. However, I do care about efficiency and results And, uh, working with a language that has been out for tens of years makes me believe my time investment is safer than with the fad-du-jour JS framework/library/whatever. BTW, Maybe buying a home in Detroit (especially now that it's officially bankrupt and will hopefully be able to break out of the unions commitments) would be a good business move? That's a cheap place to bootstrap a business for sure.
- j546 13y ago
  I can have a prototype running in a matter of minutes That's the case for any microframework whose language you're comfortable in. BTW, Maybe buying a home in Detroit (especially now that it's officially bankrupt and will hopefully be able to break out of the unions commitments) would be a good business move? That's a cheap place to bootstrap a business for sure. Not really because part of having a business is staying alive :)
  - untothebreach 13y ago
    For the record, I know plenty of alive people in Detroit :)
- TylerE 13y ago
  I challenge your efficiency claims. The benchmarks just do not support. I mean, roughly in parity with Python and PHP, 20x slower than Clojure on average, 30x slower than Haskell, and on many tasks 100x slower than C. Over the whole bredth of the Alioth shootout programs, Perl trades places with JRuby as the slowest tested language.
  - guylhem 13y ago
    Most of what I do involves loading text files with fixed width records. A file is between 500M and 4Gb. Then I do things with these records. So far I have not found anything faster than perl unpack (1), but I would be happy to. I plan to investigate Go soon. Would you have another suggestion? 1 : or marginally faster, with the advantages negated by the time it takes to write the code. However, a 10x improvement would be very interesting to me.
    - mkohlmyr 13y ago
      Well that's great... For your very narrow use case.. It is not however an effective rebuttal to the points brought up in a more general case.
      - VLM 13y ago
        "It is not however an effective rebuttal to the points brought up in a more general case." Where is this general case? I clicked thru the presentation and it boils down to here are some obscure yet interesting and trendy corners of the computational world where Perl doesn't work well, therefore we have to change everything. We could have had the same presentation 20 years ago, just the trendy weird corners would have to change to match the times. Doesn't mean those trendy corners are useless, just not required to write 'good code'. Not that the goals are inherently awful. I don't do anything requiring UTF-8 at work. Someday I probably will, and it'll probably be a PITA. I tend to see this kind of presentation as rabble rousing. "Here's some stuff that other languages care about, although you don't care, but it obviously doesn't prevent any of you from being profitable and gainfully employed writing good code so its obviously not required, which is why Perl doesn't have it. If I can convince you to care about it, Perl would gain it or more likely you'd just leave Perl. Hope you feel uplifted, here's some internet meme pictures, k thx bye" I'm not sure other languages consider it "insightful" when they get a cut and paste rephrasing of the same presentation, which is possibly the most interesting part of the whole story.
      - mhurron 13y ago
        Wait, you think opening and reading files of various sizes is a narrow case for a language named Practical Extraction and Report Language?
- pyre 13y ago
  > That's a cheap place to bootstrap a business for sure. Depends on what you're willing to give up. Emergency response time can be pretty important.
  - untothebreach 13y ago
    Especially in a city that is consistently in the top-5 most violent cities in the U.S. (disclaimer: I live in Flint, MI, another of those top-5 cities)
    - numo16 13y ago
      > (disclaimer: I live in Flint, MI, another of those top-5 cities) Me too! Most violent city, 3 years running!
- SeanDav 13y ago
  In 10 years you could say exactly the same thing, except that: - Perl 6 will STILL be in development - You just lost 10 years of development experience and related marketability because now all those fad-du-jour systems are established industry leaders - Nothing would have have changed back in Perl 5 land because everyone can only develop in 5.8.x or 5.10.x in case they break something. The upside of course is that there will still be COBOL and perl programmers making a living ...
  - chromatic 13y ago
    Nothing would have have changed back in Perl 5 land because everyone can only develop in 5.8.x or 5.10.x in case they break something. Seems doubtful to me. With yearly releases and a two year support cycle, only the enterprisey distribution nonsense is still infected with that particular brokenness.
  - VLM 13y ago
    "all those fad-du-jour systems are established industry leaders" I'm trying to think of what the fads were in 2003. That was the tail end of extreme programming. Kernel03 or kernelcon or whatever it was called had a presentation about replacing devfs with udev since adsorbed into systemd. Simultaneously the new JACK system running on top of ALSA was going to take over sound on the desktop. In 2003 Moodle was the new leader of online course software. I would claim PHP4 was a very popular web programming language in 2003. Firefox was beginning its explosive growth. Bonjour/Rendezvous was new and making noise in networking. By far the most dominant handheld computing platform was the Palm, I still had my couple year old 3 and my wife had one of the M100 series. Dot-net and/or mono were going to take over the entire world; we're still waiting. I believe by this late the cuecat had already sunk along with most of the dotcom era stuff. At this point I'm running out of ideas from 2003. I don't think "all" would be a good adjective. I'm having an easy time remembering fads that took off, and forgetting things that sank.
simias 13y ago
Dozens of slides of memes, curses and buzzwords. The state of communicating on the internet in 2013. Can someone more patient than I am tell me if there's some actual content in there?
- mahmud 13y ago
  tl;dr:   The talk might have been different, but there is nothing of substance in the slides.
  - davidw 13y ago
    I haven't even looked at these since it doesn't interest me, but I think posting slides is kind of bizarre: if they're done properly, there shouldn't be anything much of substance in them.
    - mst 13y ago
      Generally at this point the only reason I post slides at all is for people to leave open and click along while they're watching a video of the talk.
  - petepete 13y ago
    There are notes as to what the actual talk covers beneath the slides; some of them are quite substantial.
- Mithaldu 13y ago
  Did you read the notes under the slides?
  - jack-r-abbit 13y ago
    The print was very small. I can't think of a worse way to present one's thoughts. Edit: well... I guess if I could not control the speed of the slides... that would have been worse.
williadc 13y ago
tl;dr - the author wants someone to re-write Perl 5 and CPAN to add some features he likes and remove some features he doesn't like.
- petepete 13y ago
  In fairness, the author is also Stevan Little, the chap who brought us Moose and Moe http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moose_(Perl) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moose_(Perl) https://github.com/MoeOrganization/moe https://github.com/MoeOrganization/moe
- nmcfarl 13y ago
  My tl;dr - The author says people are currently writing "perls" that add features that he likes and remove features that he doesn't like - and he would like us all to consider them all the perl not just the one binary. IE the future of perl is many runtimes, that are slightly incompatible.
  - Mithaldu 13y ago
    > IE the future of perl is many runtimes, that are slightly incompatible. That is already the reality of Python and Ruby. ;)
    - dragonwriter 13y ago
      > That is already the reality of Python and Ruby. And, Common Lisp and Scheme and Java and C and C++ and SQL and Pascal and BASIC and C# and JavaScript and ... pretty much every language that is (or ever has been) both popular enough to have interest enough to support multiple implementations and not proprietary to a single vendor.
runn1ng 13y ago
I can't wait for Perl 6. </irony>
- mjolk 13y ago
  Whose irony tag are you closing? I looked at the page source and couldn't find an opening irony tag.
  - deleted 13y ago
    [deleted]
    - mjolk 13y ago
      The joke wasn't lost on me, it's just a super-tired slashdot era thing that needs to die.
  - runn1ng 13y ago
    <irony> ^^ here you go.
Mithaldu 13y ago
Before you comment, please keep the following things in mind: The talk was held by Stevan Little, the creator of Moose, the person who experimented in Moe on a modern Perl 5, and the person who is currently working on a Meta-Object-Protocol that can be put in the Perl core to make good OO available out of the box, on which Moose, Moo and friends can built. He dearly loves Perl and has done a lot for it. This talk is not a blind troll, but a warning, an overview of his past efforts and ends on a positive note. Please do not comment before actually reading the entire thing.
- jack-r-abbit 13y ago
  I won't comment then because the tiny tiny print was so painfully horrible to read I only made a few slides in. He seemed to be making a point though. Just the presentation was horrible.
  - Mithaldu 13y ago
    I agree that the font could have been bigger, especially since some people have trouble with their vision. However i would also like to remind you that probably all browsers capable of displaying the slides at all, also have zoom controls available. Lastly, i would like to thank you for refraining from commenting on the contents. That is all i ask from anyone unable to take in the content. :)
    - jack-r-abbit 13y ago
      Of course. And by the time I zoomed enough to make the tiny text a comfortable size, the slides had more than doubled in size... forcing the text (and slide controls) well below the fold. So now I have to keep scrolling up and down to read the text and see the slides. Not sure is Speakerdeck is just a crap resource or this guy just messed it up. Either way, this is a horrible presentation of thoughts.
veesahni 13y ago
For me, the biggest pros for Perl were it's extreme expressiveness and the power of CPAN. However, it wasn't without it's warts - odd threading, weird sub signatures, faked OO, etc .. I've spent a lot of time explaining the nuances of these warts to others, which only made me realize how serious these issues are. I was sold on the promises of this thing they were calling Perl 6, that was supposed to break backwards compatibility and "fix all the things" in one shot. I followed it for a couple of years and then something happened... Somebody pointed me to tryruby.org - I discovered a language that was more expressive than perl, followed similar values (i.e. There's more than one way to do it) and opened me up to a new world of meta programming. I embraced & absorbed it and today it's my weapon of choice for most of what I would have reached out to Perl for.
- Mithaldu 13y ago
  You got two things wrong there: > weird sub signatures No core signatures, but modules on CPAN that make signatures available. > faked OO The OO in Perl works almost identically to the one in Python, and i assume Ruby is similar too. The difference is that OO syntax sugar is implemented in core in Python and Ruby, while in Perl it is implemented in Perl directly and available on CPAN but in core. There's nothing fake about it. As for your conclusion: I have the strong suspicion that the difference lies less in the language itself [1], but more in the fact that with tryruby you had a modern learning resource available that taught a good coding style; while pretty much all Perl learning written before February 2012 are mainly based on material originating in the early 90ies. [2] [1] The main Ruby implementation doesn't even have multi-core-capable threads, but uses something that's basically a VM-level event system: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Green_threads http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Green_threads [2] http://perl-tutorial.org/ http://perl-tutorial.org/
  - veesahni 13y ago
    > The difference is that OO syntax sugar is implemented in core in Python and Ruby, while in Perl it is implemented in Perl directly I see what you mean. However, that syntax sugar is what people are used to from other OO implementations. Lacking that sugar meant that I found myself regularly explaining the workings of blessed hashes.
dj-wonk 13y ago
To add two different thoughts: * Perl is widely used and has inspired many other languages. These are not small accomplishments. * How many major revision bumps can a language undergo before it loses its identity? How many breaking changes are allowed before it becomes something else? Perhaps the name is about something more than the language as crystallized at any one point in time? But how do you convey that to the community as the language changes?
- Mithaldu 13y ago
  To the last point: I'm fairly sure that the identity of a language is defined by its teaching materials. Up until 2012 all Perl teaching materials were largely based on text written in the early 90s. And as well, any newbie program tended to look like it was almost Perl 4. This was in spite of there being a concensus and strong effort to push among the active Perl community that modern Perl was the way forward. Then two things happened: The books Modern Perl by chromatic and Beginning Perl by Ovid were written. I used these two books to teach newbies and their code is nothing like the code of newbies of old. If these two books reach enough penetration, they will change the identity of Perl.
  - VLM 13y ago
    "Modern Perl by chromatic" I have a copy on my desk and this cannot be emphasized enough that one inward facing book on what boils down to style and good taste, has already had more impact on the language than the last two decades of outward facing comparisons. Insert forest and trees analogies in that we've got way too many presentations over the decades about how one individual tree needs trimming or fertilizing or bonsai treatment as compared to how our neighbors orchard does the same, but not enough real forestry management presentations.
fusiongyro 13y ago
> Moe is an attempt to show a way forward, not be a way forward. I can certainly appreciate the desire to make something fun, either for your personal edification, or to try to engage the constructive aspect of your community, I have to wonder: is there enough manpower left in the Perl community to handle all five-six of these revitalization efforts, while also continuing the march to Perl 6 and maintaining 25 years of backwards compatibility? The analogy to Detroit really couldn't be more apt. In 1998 Perl had a substantial portion of all programmers simply because it was the best free tool for a wide range of jobs. In 2013 nearly every problem has a language more appropriate than Perl. You don't have a captive audience anymore. These days, almost every language is marginal and makes a living by cultivating a small but fanatical base. In order to play the new game, Perl has to find a new pitch, and "we finally work like real modern programming languages" is pretty weak. There are thousands of languages with real object systems, real exceptions, real functions, etc. Until Perl throws its weight behind something more interesting and substantial than "backwards compatibility with filth" and "someday, it might be nicer" it can expect the current trend of net emigration and a Detroit-like heat death to continue.
- Mithaldu 13y ago
  > In 2013 nearly every problem has a language more appropriate than Perl. Citation needed. Seriously, please stop making such broad statements based on your feelings and opinions and instead please make an earnest effort to separate objective facts from your subjective perception. And just to address another point: Perl has multiple real object systems that are inter-compatible (with one small exception), and are considerably more powerful than the OO of Ruby or Python. The only real complaint you can level against Perl is that they need to be installed from CPAN; which is not a very useful complaint since all the useful bits in Perl need to be installed from CPAN anyway.
  - fusiongyro 13y ago
    I'd say the onus is on Perl to be the best language for a niche, rather than on me to provide a list of niches with languages better than Perl. Besides that, language appropriateness is necessarily subjective. I love Prolog and Haskell and use them all the time. My passion for them makes their thorns seem small and easily avoided, but the reality is that those thorns are sufficient to keep out a lot of curious people. I didn't really figure out how to write a Prolog program that handled command line arguments until a month ago. Prior to that, I would just run Prolog, consult my script and run my function. Simple enough barrier, but one that would have kept most of my friends away. I think you took my "real X, Y, Z" list as a literal insult, which isn't what I meant. I don't know Perl. I was just referencing the presentation, not trying to sling arrows at Moose or whatever. I do think that providing multiple options where most languages have one option built-in is unnecessary cognitive load. One doesn't "choose" an "object system" for Python--what benefit would one hope to gain? That the options are compatible is nice, but it's indisputably more work for everyone than just having one. Having what are essentially language built-ins elsewhere available instead on CPAN is worth complaining about, because if you're going to do things differently from others, the difference should be motivated by something. That something in Perl is backwards compatibility and the desire to provide lots of options. The former is an explanation, not a rationale, and the latter implies, again, a cognitive cost. When you spend my attention and brain power, I had better get something in return. "Options" are only worth something if the alternatives are worth choosing between. In the case of OO, complete intercompatibility between them suggests the differences are minor; in that case, why have them?
antitrust 13y ago
A few thoughts: Trends come and go, but it's the general purpose languages that remain. Perl seems to fit in that space that was occupied by the various BASICs in the 1980s, meaning that it was the best glue for everyday tasks. It's quick to write, has the right tools, and plays well with system tools. In general, in my experience, it's the quality of staff and not the tools that makes the difference. Good management, coders and business-side analysts make a much bigger difference than what language you use. In general, in my experience, few experienced Perl programmers use vanilla Perl. Almost all of them rely heavily on libraries and write code according to their own knowledge of what's most efficient. Be wary of the world of trends in programming. It is as fickle as trends in education, interior design or nutrition. Then again, I'm still waiting for the Pascal comeback.
ape4 13y ago
I like the "bikeshedding" idea.
PleaseBeSerious 13y ago
I switched languages 6 months ago. I now make more than I did as a Perl developer for 7+ years.
codeboost 13y ago
The reverse sounds nicer : Detroit - the Perl of cities :)
jimmytucson 13y ago
Perl is actually far from abandoned and I would venture to guess (based on no facts and figures but my own personal experience) that there are more lines of Perl in production today than Python or Ruby combined. But how can that be?! Building a large scale application with Perl would be like building a F111A Aardvark out of duct tape! Quite simply, because Perl is the perfect duct tape. Too many people (knowingly or not) think of Perl as a crappy version of Python when it's actually shell scripting on steroids. You see, way up here, where projects are constantly in development, paradigms are constantly shifting, and people are building new and exciting things, Perl is an unwelcome high school acquaintance who shows up at the party and makes everybody feel awkward and bad. But way down there, where people are just trying to keep Sputnik up and running until the Soviet Union collapses, Perl is a rock star! If it's too "small" for Java but too "large" for .ksh -- guess what, use Perl. In my opinion, if you want a scripting language with function signatures, little to no support for UNIX commands, real object orientation (Moose), yadda yadda yadda... just use Python. No one's going to blame you. Larry Wall's not gonna feel bad. You have a right to your impact gun and bolts. Just leave my duct tape alone.

72 points by petepete 13y ago

In perl5 : - I can have a prototype running in a matter of minutes - I have access to a vast library of modules doing everything I need (which helps the former) - I write quick and efficient code Do I really care about what other people think about the languages and tools I use? No. However, I do care about efficiency and results And, uh, working with a language that has been out for tens of years makes me believe my time investment is safer than with the fad-du-jour JS framework/library/whatever. BTW, Maybe buying a home in Detroit (especially now that it's officially bankrupt and will hopefully be able to break out of the unions commitments) would be a good business move? That's a cheap place to bootstrap a business for sure.

j546 13y ago
I can have a prototype running in a matter of minutes That's the case for any microframework whose language you're comfortable in. BTW, Maybe buying a home in Detroit (especially now that it's officially bankrupt and will hopefully be able to break out of the unions commitments) would be a good business move? That's a cheap place to bootstrap a business for sure. Not really because part of having a business is staying alive :)
- untothebreach 13y ago
  For the record, I know plenty of alive people in Detroit :)
TylerE 13y ago
I challenge your efficiency claims. The benchmarks just do not support. I mean, roughly in parity with Python and PHP, 20x slower than Clojure on average, 30x slower than Haskell, and on many tasks 100x slower than C. Over the whole bredth of the Alioth shootout programs, Perl trades places with JRuby as the slowest tested language.
- guylhem 13y ago
  Most of what I do involves loading text files with fixed width records. A file is between 500M and 4Gb. Then I do things with these records. So far I have not found anything faster than perl unpack (1), but I would be happy to. I plan to investigate Go soon. Would you have another suggestion? 1 : or marginally faster, with the advantages negated by the time it takes to write the code. However, a 10x improvement would be very interesting to me.
  - mkohlmyr 13y ago
    Well that's great... For your very narrow use case.. It is not however an effective rebuttal to the points brought up in a more general case.
    - VLM 13y ago
      "It is not however an effective rebuttal to the points brought up in a more general case." Where is this general case? I clicked thru the presentation and it boils down to here are some obscure yet interesting and trendy corners of the computational world where Perl doesn't work well, therefore we have to change everything. We could have had the same presentation 20 years ago, just the trendy weird corners would have to change to match the times. Doesn't mean those trendy corners are useless, just not required to write 'good code'. Not that the goals are inherently awful. I don't do anything requiring UTF-8 at work. Someday I probably will, and it'll probably be a PITA. I tend to see this kind of presentation as rabble rousing. "Here's some stuff that other languages care about, although you don't care, but it obviously doesn't prevent any of you from being profitable and gainfully employed writing good code so its obviously not required, which is why Perl doesn't have it. If I can convince you to care about it, Perl would gain it or more likely you'd just leave Perl. Hope you feel uplifted, here's some internet meme pictures, k thx bye" I'm not sure other languages consider it "insightful" when they get a cut and paste rephrasing of the same presentation, which is possibly the most interesting part of the whole story.
    - mhurron 13y ago
      Wait, you think opening and reading files of various sizes is a narrow case for a language named Practical Extraction and Report Language?
pyre 13y ago
> That's a cheap place to bootstrap a business for sure. Depends on what you're willing to give up. Emergency response time can be pretty important.
- untothebreach 13y ago
  Especially in a city that is consistently in the top-5 most violent cities in the U.S. (disclaimer: I live in Flint, MI, another of those top-5 cities)
  - numo16 13y ago
    > (disclaimer: I live in Flint, MI, another of those top-5 cities) Me too! Most violent city, 3 years running!
SeanDav 13y ago
In 10 years you could say exactly the same thing, except that: - Perl 6 will STILL be in development - You just lost 10 years of development experience and related marketability because now all those fad-du-jour systems are established industry leaders - Nothing would have have changed back in Perl 5 land because everyone can only develop in 5.8.x or 5.10.x in case they break something. The upside of course is that there will still be COBOL and perl programmers making a living ...
- chromatic 13y ago
  Nothing would have have changed back in Perl 5 land because everyone can only develop in 5.8.x or 5.10.x in case they break something. Seems doubtful to me. With yearly releases and a two year support cycle, only the enterprisey distribution nonsense is still infected with that particular brokenness.
- VLM 13y ago
  "all those fad-du-jour systems are established industry leaders" I'm trying to think of what the fads were in 2003. That was the tail end of extreme programming. Kernel03 or kernelcon or whatever it was called had a presentation about replacing devfs with udev since adsorbed into systemd. Simultaneously the new JACK system running on top of ALSA was going to take over sound on the desktop. In 2003 Moodle was the new leader of online course software. I would claim PHP4 was a very popular web programming language in 2003. Firefox was beginning its explosive growth. Bonjour/Rendezvous was new and making noise in networking. By far the most dominant handheld computing platform was the Palm, I still had my couple year old 3 and my wife had one of the M100 series. Dot-net and/or mono were going to take over the entire world; we're still waiting. I believe by this late the cuecat had already sunk along with most of the dotcom era stuff. At this point I'm running out of ideas from 2003. I don't think "all" would be a good adjective. I'm having an easy time remembering fads that took off, and forgetting things that sank.

simias 13y ago

Dozens of slides of memes, curses and buzzwords. The state of communicating on the internet in 2013. Can someone more patient than I am tell me if there's some actual content in there?

mahmud 13y ago
tl;dr:   The talk might have been different, but there is nothing of substance in the slides.
- davidw 13y ago
  I haven't even looked at these since it doesn't interest me, but I think posting slides is kind of bizarre: if they're done properly, there shouldn't be anything much of substance in them.
  - mst 13y ago
    Generally at this point the only reason I post slides at all is for people to leave open and click along while they're watching a video of the talk.
- petepete 13y ago
  There are notes as to what the actual talk covers beneath the slides; some of them are quite substantial.
Mithaldu 13y ago
Did you read the notes under the slides?
- jack-r-abbit 13y ago
  The print was very small. I can't think of a worse way to present one's thoughts. Edit: well... I guess if I could not control the speed of the slides... that would have been worse.

williadc 13y ago

tl;dr - the author wants someone to re-write Perl 5 and CPAN to add some features he likes and remove some features he doesn't like.

petepete 13y ago
In fairness, the author is also Stevan Little, the chap who brought us Moose and Moe http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moose_(Perl) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moose_(Perl) https://github.com/MoeOrganization/moe https://github.com/MoeOrganization/moe
nmcfarl 13y ago
My tl;dr - The author says people are currently writing "perls" that add features that he likes and remove features that he doesn't like - and he would like us all to consider them all the perl not just the one binary. IE the future of perl is many runtimes, that are slightly incompatible.
- Mithaldu 13y ago
  > IE the future of perl is many runtimes, that are slightly incompatible. That is already the reality of Python and Ruby. ;)
  - dragonwriter 13y ago
    > That is already the reality of Python and Ruby. And, Common Lisp and Scheme and Java and C and C++ and SQL and Pascal and BASIC and C# and JavaScript and ... pretty much every language that is (or ever has been) both popular enough to have interest enough to support multiple implementations and not proprietary to a single vendor.

runn1ng 13y ago

I can't wait for Perl 6. </irony>

mjolk 13y ago
Whose irony tag are you closing? I looked at the page source and couldn't find an opening irony tag.
- deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
  - mjolk 13y ago
    The joke wasn't lost on me, it's just a super-tired slashdot era thing that needs to die.
- runn1ng 13y ago
  <irony> ^^ here you go.

Mithaldu 13y ago

Before you comment, please keep the following things in mind: The talk was held by Stevan Little, the creator of Moose, the person who experimented in Moe on a modern Perl 5, and the person who is currently working on a Meta-Object-Protocol that can be put in the Perl core to make good OO available out of the box, on which Moose, Moo and friends can built. He dearly loves Perl and has done a lot for it. This talk is not a blind troll, but a warning, an overview of his past efforts and ends on a positive note. Please do not comment before actually reading the entire thing.

jack-r-abbit 13y ago
I won't comment then because the tiny tiny print was so painfully horrible to read I only made a few slides in. He seemed to be making a point though. Just the presentation was horrible.
- Mithaldu 13y ago
  I agree that the font could have been bigger, especially since some people have trouble with their vision. However i would also like to remind you that probably all browsers capable of displaying the slides at all, also have zoom controls available. Lastly, i would like to thank you for refraining from commenting on the contents. That is all i ask from anyone unable to take in the content. :)
  - jack-r-abbit 13y ago
    Of course. And by the time I zoomed enough to make the tiny text a comfortable size, the slides had more than doubled in size... forcing the text (and slide controls) well below the fold. So now I have to keep scrolling up and down to read the text and see the slides. Not sure is Speakerdeck is just a crap resource or this guy just messed it up. Either way, this is a horrible presentation of thoughts.

veesahni 13y ago

For me, the biggest pros for Perl were it's extreme expressiveness and the power of CPAN. However, it wasn't without it's warts - odd threading, weird sub signatures, faked OO, etc .. I've spent a lot of time explaining the nuances of these warts to others, which only made me realize how serious these issues are. I was sold on the promises of this thing they were calling Perl 6, that was supposed to break backwards compatibility and "fix all the things" in one shot. I followed it for a couple of years and then something happened... Somebody pointed me to tryruby.org - I discovered a language that was more expressive than perl, followed similar values (i.e. There's more than one way to do it) and opened me up to a new world of meta programming. I embraced & absorbed it and today it's my weapon of choice for most of what I would have reached out to Perl for.

Mithaldu 13y ago
You got two things wrong there: > weird sub signatures No core signatures, but modules on CPAN that make signatures available. > faked OO The OO in Perl works almost identically to the one in Python, and i assume Ruby is similar too. The difference is that OO syntax sugar is implemented in core in Python and Ruby, while in Perl it is implemented in Perl directly and available on CPAN but in core. There's nothing fake about it. As for your conclusion: I have the strong suspicion that the difference lies less in the language itself [1], but more in the fact that with tryruby you had a modern learning resource available that taught a good coding style; while pretty much all Perl learning written before February 2012 are mainly based on material originating in the early 90ies. [2] [1] The main Ruby implementation doesn't even have multi-core-capable threads, but uses something that's basically a VM-level event system: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Green_threads http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Green_threads [2] http://perl-tutorial.org/ http://perl-tutorial.org/
- veesahni 13y ago
  > The difference is that OO syntax sugar is implemented in core in Python and Ruby, while in Perl it is implemented in Perl directly I see what you mean. However, that syntax sugar is what people are used to from other OO implementations. Lacking that sugar meant that I found myself regularly explaining the workings of blessed hashes.

dj-wonk 13y ago

To add two different thoughts: * Perl is widely used and has inspired many other languages. These are not small accomplishments. * How many major revision bumps can a language undergo before it loses its identity? How many breaking changes are allowed before it becomes something else? Perhaps the name is about something more than the language as crystallized at any one point in time? But how do you convey that to the community as the language changes?

Mithaldu 13y ago
To the last point: I'm fairly sure that the identity of a language is defined by its teaching materials. Up until 2012 all Perl teaching materials were largely based on text written in the early 90s. And as well, any newbie program tended to look like it was almost Perl 4. This was in spite of there being a concensus and strong effort to push among the active Perl community that modern Perl was the way forward. Then two things happened: The books Modern Perl by chromatic and Beginning Perl by Ovid were written. I used these two books to teach newbies and their code is nothing like the code of newbies of old. If these two books reach enough penetration, they will change the identity of Perl.
- VLM 13y ago
  "Modern Perl by chromatic" I have a copy on my desk and this cannot be emphasized enough that one inward facing book on what boils down to style and good taste, has already had more impact on the language than the last two decades of outward facing comparisons. Insert forest and trees analogies in that we've got way too many presentations over the decades about how one individual tree needs trimming or fertilizing or bonsai treatment as compared to how our neighbors orchard does the same, but not enough real forestry management presentations.

fusiongyro 13y ago

> Moe is an attempt to show a way forward, not be a way forward. I can certainly appreciate the desire to make something fun, either for your personal edification, or to try to engage the constructive aspect of your community, I have to wonder: is there enough manpower left in the Perl community to handle all five-six of these revitalization efforts, while also continuing the march to Perl 6 and maintaining 25 years of backwards compatibility? The analogy to Detroit really couldn't be more apt. In 1998 Perl had a substantial portion of all programmers simply because it was the best free tool for a wide range of jobs. In 2013 nearly every problem has a language more appropriate than Perl. You don't have a captive audience anymore. These days, almost every language is marginal and makes a living by cultivating a small but fanatical base. In order to play the new game, Perl has to find a new pitch, and "we finally work like real modern programming languages" is pretty weak. There are thousands of languages with real object systems, real exceptions, real functions, etc. Until Perl throws its weight behind something more interesting and substantial than "backwards compatibility with filth" and "someday, it might be nicer" it can expect the current trend of net emigration and a Detroit-like heat death to continue.

Mithaldu 13y ago
> In 2013 nearly every problem has a language more appropriate than Perl. Citation needed. Seriously, please stop making such broad statements based on your feelings and opinions and instead please make an earnest effort to separate objective facts from your subjective perception. And just to address another point: Perl has multiple real object systems that are inter-compatible (with one small exception), and are considerably more powerful than the OO of Ruby or Python. The only real complaint you can level against Perl is that they need to be installed from CPAN; which is not a very useful complaint since all the useful bits in Perl need to be installed from CPAN anyway.
- fusiongyro 13y ago
  I'd say the onus is on Perl to be the best language for a niche, rather than on me to provide a list of niches with languages better than Perl. Besides that, language appropriateness is necessarily subjective. I love Prolog and Haskell and use them all the time. My passion for them makes their thorns seem small and easily avoided, but the reality is that those thorns are sufficient to keep out a lot of curious people. I didn't really figure out how to write a Prolog program that handled command line arguments until a month ago. Prior to that, I would just run Prolog, consult my script and run my function. Simple enough barrier, but one that would have kept most of my friends away. I think you took my "real X, Y, Z" list as a literal insult, which isn't what I meant. I don't know Perl. I was just referencing the presentation, not trying to sling arrows at Moose or whatever. I do think that providing multiple options where most languages have one option built-in is unnecessary cognitive load. One doesn't "choose" an "object system" for Python--what benefit would one hope to gain? That the options are compatible is nice, but it's indisputably more work for everyone than just having one. Having what are essentially language built-ins elsewhere available instead on CPAN is worth complaining about, because if you're going to do things differently from others, the difference should be motivated by something. That something in Perl is backwards compatibility and the desire to provide lots of options. The former is an explanation, not a rationale, and the latter implies, again, a cognitive cost. When you spend my attention and brain power, I had better get something in return. "Options" are only worth something if the alternatives are worth choosing between. In the case of OO, complete intercompatibility between them suggests the differences are minor; in that case, why have them?

antitrust 13y ago

A few thoughts: Trends come and go, but it's the general purpose languages that remain. Perl seems to fit in that space that was occupied by the various BASICs in the 1980s, meaning that it was the best glue for everyday tasks. It's quick to write, has the right tools, and plays well with system tools. In general, in my experience, it's the quality of staff and not the tools that makes the difference. Good management, coders and business-side analysts make a much bigger difference than what language you use. In general, in my experience, few experienced Perl programmers use vanilla Perl. Almost all of them rely heavily on libraries and write code according to their own knowledge of what's most efficient. Be wary of the world of trends in programming. It is as fickle as trends in education, interior design or nutrition. Then again, I'm still waiting for the Pascal comeback.

ape4 13y ago

I like the "bikeshedding" idea.

PleaseBeSerious 13y ago

I switched languages 6 months ago. I now make more than I did as a Perl developer for 7+ years.

codeboost 13y ago

The reverse sounds nicer : Detroit - the Perl of cities :)

jimmytucson 13y ago

Perl is actually far from abandoned and I would venture to guess (based on no facts and figures but my own personal experience) that there are more lines of Perl in production today than Python or Ruby combined. But how can that be?! Building a large scale application with Perl would be like building a F111A Aardvark out of duct tape! Quite simply, because Perl is the perfect duct tape. Too many people (knowingly or not) think of Perl as a crappy version of Python when it's actually shell scripting on steroids. You see, way up here, where projects are constantly in development, paradigms are constantly shifting, and people are building new and exciting things, Perl is an unwelcome high school acquaintance who shows up at the party and makes everybody feel awkward and bad. But way down there, where people are just trying to keep Sputnik up and running until the Soviet Union collapses, Perl is a rock star! If it's too "small" for Java but too "large" for .ksh -- guess what, use Perl. In my opinion, if you want a scripting language with function signatures, little to no support for UNIX commands, real object orientation (Moose), yadda yadda yadda... just use Python. No one's going to blame you. Larry Wall's not gonna feel bad. You have a right to your impact gun and bolts. Just leave my duct tape alone.