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Perl still sucks, and I wrote Perl5 code for years. It's more about the inconsistency in the way the language is implemented. Having to explicitly scope variabl

Perl still sucks, and I wrote Perl5 code for years. It's more about the inconsistency in the way the language is implemented. Having to explicitly scope variables, the disaster than is OOP, the riddling of special cases and context-sensitivity, by-ref vs. by-val, etc etc etc. Having to memorize all of these various cases sucks. The only upside to Perl is the CPAN. Other than that, there's no reason to waste your time when there are fantastic languages like Python and Ruby out there. Steve Yegge says it best: "Within about 3 days, I was more comfortable with Ruby than seven years had made me with Perl. I was still accidentally sticking "my" in front of variable declarations, typing "sub" instead of "def", little things like that. But I was already starting to think in Ruby, and suddenly I had all this extra space in my brain. You have to learn Perl by memorizing, but you learn Ruby by understanding."

zby 17y ago
Perl is pretty big language and build of not very orthogonal parts. I've read somewhere an interview with Larry Wall where he said he was not planning to make the language very clean and orthogonal from the start - but instead he wanted to watch the way people use the language and then cut off the unused parts (the actual analogy was with building pavements along the paths that people made in the grass instead of planning up front how they are going to commute). I think that cut off phase never came. After some 10 years of programming in Perl, there are still areas that I don't know really well - I just don't use them, and when reading other peoples code I still sometimes need to lookup something. I can see why this can be annoying. But eventually the size of the libraries that you need to memorize when programming is still much bigger than the language itself, so it does not matter that much. My prediction is that other languages will not build their CPAN equivalents soon. It looks so easy to copy, especially if you believe you have a better language, but what people don't see is the complex network of things that enable CPAN existence. It's not just code repository it is a complex ecosystem.
chromatic 17y ago
> Having to explicitly scope variables.... ... prevents bugs. > ... the disaster than is OOP Lifted wholesale from Python. > You have to learn Perl by memorizing.... Some of us learned it by understanding.

zby 17y ago

Perl is pretty big language and build of not very orthogonal parts. I've read somewhere an interview with Larry Wall where he said he was not planning to make the language very clean and orthogonal from the start - but instead he wanted to watch the way people use the language and then cut off the unused parts (the actual analogy was with building pavements along the paths that people made in the grass instead of planning up front how they are going to commute). I think that cut off phase never came. After some 10 years of programming in Perl, there are still areas that I don't know really well - I just don't use them, and when reading other peoples code I still sometimes need to lookup something. I can see why this can be annoying. But eventually the size of the libraries that you need to memorize when programming is still much bigger than the language itself, so it does not matter that much. My prediction is that other languages will not build their CPAN equivalents soon. It looks so easy to copy, especially if you believe you have a better language, but what people don't see is the complex network of things that enable CPAN existence. It's not just code repository it is a complex ecosystem.

chromatic 17y ago

> Having to explicitly scope variables.... ... prevents bugs. > ... the disaster than is OOP Lifted wholesale from Python. > You have to learn Perl by memorizing.... Some of us learned it by understanding.