zlacker

>>todsac+(OP)
There was a lot of pressure in the Perl community to write things as succinctly as possible instead of as maintainably and understandably. That’s not realistic for use in a field with a lot of turnover and job hopping.

>>RayFra+P3
There was no such pressure. That's ridiculous. There were a lot of things people could grab as reasons to form an opinion without even reading articles, never mind the tutorial. They then ended up with php or python, even java for crying out loud, and years later THAT was a problem.

>>creer+2b
> There was no such pressure. That's ridiculous.

I lived it. I'm sure there's still some Mailing List archives and IRC snippets that still endure, demonstrating the utter vicious 1-upmanship of how to do something in Perl as succinctly as possible. Why do X and Y when you can just do Z? What are you really trying to do? etc.

>>Superm+te
You COULD, if you wanted, and spent quite a bit of effort in the pursuit of that hobby, participate in one-liner, or obfuscation, or golfing friendly contests. Which were enabled by perl's expressiveness constructs. Nobody pushed anyone into that. On the contrary "there is more than one way to do it" was there to legitimize that getting the problem solved was the goal - instead of trying to force a one true way (like python).

After that, experts would often propose multiple ways to do something when they answered questions. THEY found that intellectually playful and exciting. They still do. And for the rest of us, that was an amazing way to learn more and understand more of that tool we were using daily. Still is.

You apparently saw viciousness in this and that certainly sucks.