zlacker

>>todsac+(OP)
I always found the Perl "community" to be really off-putting with all the monk and wizard nonsense. Then there was the whole one-liner thing that was all about being clever and obscure. Everything about Python came off as being much more serious and normal for a young nerd who wasn't a theater kid.

>>jordan+D3
I'm having to pick up some perl now, and while I don't interact with the community, it surely _feels_ like it was written by wizards, for wizards. Obscure, non-intuitive oneliners, syntax that feels like it was intentionally written to be complicated, and a few other things that feel impossible to understand without reading the docs. (Before everyone jumps on me - yes, as a developer, I should be able to read documentation. And I did. But until I did so, what the code was doing was completely opaque to me. That feels like bad language design.)

Some of it I recognize as being an artefact of the time, when conciseness really mattered. But it's still obnoxious in 2025.

The whole thing reminds me of D&D, which is full of classes & spells that only exist in modern D&D because of One Guy who happened to be at the table with Gygax, who really wanted to be a wuxia guy he saw in a movie, or because he really wanted a spell to be applicable for that one night at the table, and now it's hard-coded into the game.

>>pavel_+m8
It’s interesting to me how brains work.

Perl has always “flowed” for me and made mostly intuitive sense. Every other language I’ve had to hack on to get something done is a struggle for me to fit into some rigid-feeling mental box.

I understand I’m the weird one, but man I miss Perl being an acceptable language to pound out a quick program in between “bash script” and “real developer”.

>>phil21+yd
Was Perl one of your first languages by any chance? I freely admit that I've only been poking at it for a few months; maybe by this time next year, I'll be boggled at the comment I left, like it was written by a different person.

> in between “bash script” and “real developer”.

One of my coworkers gave me some great perspective by saying, "at least it's not written in Bash!"

>>pavel_+Aj
> One of my coworkers gave me some great perspective by saying, "at least it's not written in Bash!"

I wish bash was the thing that was dying. As an industry, we need to make better choices.

>>asa400+Zn
Indeed. If I had to download and install bash … I wouldn’t!

I write bash scripts only because I can rely on it being there.