zlacker

>>todsac+(OP)
In fairness, Perl died because it was just not a good language compared to others that popped up after its peak. Sometimes people just move to the better option.

>>mmastr+53
Perl is a great language, the way Scala and Haskell are great: as openly experimental languages, they tried interesting, unorthodox approaches, with varied success. "More than one way to do it" is Perl's motto, because of its audacious experimentation ethos, I'd say.

Perl is not that good a language though for practical purposes. The same way, a breadboard contraption is not what you want to ship as your hardware product, but without it, and the mistakes made and addressed while tinkering with it, the sleek consumer-grade PCB won't be possible to design.

>>nine_k+c5
> "More than one way to do it" is Perl's motto, because of its audacious experimentation ethos, I'd say.

Perl lets every developer write Perl in their own idiosyncratic way.

And every developer does.

It makes for very un-fun times when I'm having to read a file that's been authored by ten developers over ten years, each of whom with varying opinions and skill levels.

I guess in 2026, it'll be 11 developers writing it over 11 years. My sincere apologies to those who come after me, and my sincere fuck-you to those who came before me. :)

>>pavel_+H8
Something I only figured out in the ‘10s is that the main tax of code smells is during debugging. Debugging when taken to the level of art is less about sorting all of the possible causes for a problem by likelihood but by ease of validation.

Things that are cheap to check should be checked first unless they are really unlikely. You change the numbers game from trying to make the biggest cleaving lines possible, to smaller bites that can be done rapidly (and perhaps more importantly, mentally cheaply).

Code smells chum the waters. Because where there is smoke sometimes there is fire, and code smells often hide bugs. You get into Tony Hoare’s Turing award speech; either no bugs are obvious, or there are no obvious bugs.

So I end up making the change easy and then making the easy change because we have more code each week so the existing code needs to be simpler if someone is going to continue to understand the entire thing.

Perl doesn’t seem to have figured this out at all.