zlacker

>>speckx+(OP)
As a very long-time Perl developer and FOSS contributor, I think this blog post is incorrect about whether Perl 6/Raku was a factor in Perl's decline. I think Perl 6/Raku did a few things that hurt Perl 5:

1. It pulled away folks who would otherwise have spent time improving Perl 5 (either the core or via modules).

2. It discouraged significant changes to the Perl 5 language, since many people figured that it wasn't worth it with Perl 6 just around the corner.

3. It confused CTO/VP Eng types, some of whom thought that they shouldn't invest in Perl 5, since Perl 6 was coming soon. I've heard multiple people in the Perl community discuss hearing this directly from execs.

Of course, hindsight is 20/20 and all that.

Also, even if Perl 6 had never happened the way it did and instead we'd just had smaller evolutions of the language in major versions, I think usage would still have shrunk over time.

A lot of people just dislike Perl's weird syntax and behavior. Many of those people were in a position to teach undergrads, and they chose to use Python and Java.

And other languages have improved a lot or been created in the past 20+ years. Java has gotten way better, as has Python. JavaScript went from "terribly browser-only language" to "much less terrible run anywhere language" with a huge ecosystem. And Go came along and provided an aggressively mediocre but very usable strongly typed language with super-fast builds and easy deploys.

Edit: Also PHP was a huge factor in displacing Perl for the quick and dirty web app on hosted services. It was super easy to deploy and ran way faster than Perl without mod_perl. Using mod_perl generally wasn't possible on shared hosting, which was very common back in the days before everyone got their own VM.

All of those things would still have eaten some of Perl's lunch.

>>autarc+ZJ
> And Go came along and provided an aggressively mediocre but very usable

See, that's one of the things lots of people who enjoy Perl and/or Ruby in the comments around in this thread don't quite grasp: some languages require programmers possessing a somewhat special state of mind to read and write productively, and some languages allow pretty much every mediocre programmer to read and write, and still produce a manageable program.

The other thing is the information density. In my experience, most people after graduating high school have experience with reading mainstream fiction and school textbooks, and those things you can half-skim/half-read and still get out most of the meaning. Then those people hit the college-/university-level textbooks and screech and crash because those books, you have to read them sentence by sentence; not everyone can get get used to it (or even realize they have to do that in the first place). And similar observations hold for programming languages: Perl and APL are just way too dense compared to Go and Python; if you're used to reading code line-by-line (skimming over half of them), then it's really bloody annoying to switch to reading sigil-by-sigil (as for writing, well, we all know that typing speed was never really a bottleneck for programmers).

>>Joker_+bK1
My main complaints about Go are not that it needs more obscure syntax. The biggest problem with Go is basically that the core of the language's syntax is special, and only accessible to the compiler. This goes hand in hand with the language not offering generics out of the gate. This means that things like slices, maps, channels, etc. are all special. You cannot implement anything similar that uses the same syntax (even now that generics exist).

This lack of flexibility means that it's impossible to experiment with replacements for built-ins, and the lack of generics out of the gate meant so many things were simply impossible (like useful iterators).

Compare this to Rust, where almost everything like this is just a trait. If you want to offer a map replacement, you just implement the Index and IndexMut traits.

Overall, I don't think Perl is the best language design. It has some interesting ideas. Go is _also_ not the best language design. Is Rust the _best_? No, but it's better than both Perl and Go, IMO.

>>autarc+Wo2
But I don't want to read your cute custom hashmap code. Go really shot for the stars with its primary design goal of uniformity. The hashmap you're using is the same one I'm using, is the same one any random Go repo on Github I open uses. The value of this is immense—I instantly feel right at home, I know the exact semantics you're using—we're speaking the same language.

To wit, I would argue that Go didn't go far enough in restricting the user and certainly did not pick the right features to include. I don't think it's clear at all that had go shipped with sum types—enabling better error handling—and iterators, more built in generic data structures, and higher level abstractions around its concurrency, but no generics at all, that we wouldn't end up with a far better language. A more restricted one, with even less room for anything custom, but a better one.