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 isn't bad language design that you need to study the language before you can use it. I look at haskell programs and it looks mysterious to me because I haven't spent any time studying it, but I'd not thing to say it is bad language design.

Yes, one can write obscure perl code and some love perl golfing. In the same way there is an IOCCC which delights in unreadable code, it doesn't mean that the C language should be relegated to the dustbin. The answer is to write readable code, no matter which language is in use.

>>tasty_+4h
But I can look at most Python code and be able to understand what it does. With perl, I have to look up so much.

- Why is there a `1;` on a single line in the middle of this file?

- What is `$_`?

- This parallel execution manager doesn't actually seem to define what code needs to run in parallel in any specific way, how does this work?

- What is this BEGIN block at the start of this Perl file? Why is that necessary?

- What's going on with qx, qw, qq?

- What does chomp do when it's just on its own line, with no arguments given to it?

>>pavel_+Wj
If you think that's bad, try learning python or a verbose language while not speaking english, all of these words like while, for, if, else, break are just gibberish and your code just reeks of some weird mish mash of broken english and broken <mother tongue>, I have a hypothesis that terseness favors universality, if you don't speak english, something like $_ is equal or easier to grasp, it honestly just looks like terse and weird math.