zlacker

This is exactly the point.

There was a fifteen year period where the best way of finding out what something meant in a programming language was to Google it. Pre-AI, post the predominance of newsgroups and offline documentation.

Try googling "$|++". It just doesn't work. Never has.

Now Google "file.flush". First hit is the answer you need on SO.

>>debtta+(OP)
You did not need to google anything. The complete documentation was right there, next to the interpreter, on your machine. Ready for scanning and reading from top to bottom; and broken in sections that were actually relevant; and ready to search in bulk if you prefered with whichever local search tool you cared for.

No need for google. (And google was run by python fans; probably saw no need to support searching for '$|++'.)

And I notice "post the predominance of offline doc". Well that's one problem right there: As of 2025, there is still nothing that beats perl 5 docs as ~260 man pages. Probably LLM-based AI is getting there, at least for people who have difficulty with text. But for the rest of us, it's VERY useful to know that there is solid (offline) doc.

>>creer+Zh
Right, yes, exactly.

>>creer+Zh
Also to be fair, a modern Perl app doesn't even need to use `$|++` since the framework, even if it's raw Plack, will manage output flushing for you since you're no longer banging on raw stdout. I'd say Perl suffers from an even worse problem of legacy tutorials than PHP, but the size of PHP's userbase and thus sheer number of bad tutorials makes it worse there.

chromatic's https://modernperlbooks.com site is nearly unmaintained now, but still contains some good links to tutorials and whatnot on the obvious subject. Including a pretty recent retrospective: https://outspeaking.com/words-of-technology/why-perl-didnt-w...