In my mind (developer back then) I'd amateur-psychoanalyze all of that nonsense as some kind of inferiority complex meant to preserve the self image. Needless complexity can be a feature!
And now we are all developers!
Edit: But I see your point, Google SRE’s around the late 2000’s reached for Python more than Perl.
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.
Pretending to be a all serius grown ups language is cringe.
Pyton was ("was" was used here on purpose) the opposite, the whole "one way to do a thing" and insisting on more clean code even if more verbose.
You could write nice looking Perl code but you had to choose to do it, while Python pushed you in that direction from the start.
As much as I dislike using whitespace as flow control it also does make sure the code is always indented reasonably even if it is a newbie just starting in the language.
It didn't help that Perl, just like other languages after (PHP, JS, Python too), had a "curse of the newbie language", with many people starting with it (as at the time it was kinda only sensible choice for webpages before mod_php did a revolution in how most webpages are hosted), with no training and just winging it, which in language that puts no limits on what user can do and no guidance on what they should do... leads to that ugly one liners and line noise as a code scripts.
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”.
Also, I think Larry Wall's "Diligence, Patience, Humility"[0] is among my favourite articles about programming.
[0] https://www.oreilly.com/openbook/opensources/book/larry.html
Sysadmin-driven companies (typically Sun-based) often used Perl.
Developer-driven companies used other languages running on cheaper X86 Linux.
It was an artefact of bursting out of those constraints, but honoring them still. The roots of perl as a “more capable, less restrictive” sed/awk means that it must support `perl -pi.bak -e oneliner file`, just like sed did — and so from that core requirement forward, everything it did, does. By the heyday of Perl5 era, conciseness was not a requirement, but the sed-compat roots remained a focus of the language’s creator.
I liked it, thought the sigils were a cute way to singal that something is a variable. When you work with deeply nested data structures, dereferencing arrays and hashes that sort of changes and becomes kind of annoying. Nowadays I like Ruby. Compared to it, Perl does feel like spells mixed with C and Posix stuff. But if I want to feel smart, I'll write some code in Scheme, thank you.
At that time, Guido was still working at CNRI locally to us in Reston, VA and we had several discussions at the local Pyggies (Python User Group) on transitioning over to Python for that work. We were a (mostly) C++/Java shop, but Perl fit into all the other "crevices" beautifully.
Python just didn't have enough library support for all of our "swiss-army chainsaw" demands. Still, it was very apparent at the time it would eventually get there and I was enamored with its "one right way" of doing things--even at the bytecode level.
They forget that Perl and co. were written by people that had one too many tabs of LSD in the 70s, sporting long hair and a ponytail.
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.
Hopefully I am paraphrasing you correctly.
Or, as the kids say, a flex, but without the sexy connotations.
(Incidentally, I am also reminded of a great quote attributed to Morphy:
"The ability to play chess is the sign of a gentleman. The ability to play chess well is the sign of a wasted life.")
> 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!"
- 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?
But having to interact with it once in a while is always a hurdle. The same with bash. Do I use [ or [[? Where does the semi-colon go? if then fi, but while do done (and not elihw). -eq or =? Functions have () but no parameters.
I'm sure those things make sense when all you write is Bash / Perl, but it's daunting.
Now, Python can get pretty far out there too with Meta-programming, and JavaScript can get confusing with prototyping. And Ruby (especially RoR) takes the crown, where they resolve variables at the moment the line executes. Makes debugging blocks really hard.
The less magic in code the better.
Just being able to play chess is not a very high bar at all. Most 6-year-olds can learn it in an hour. Are the Chess hustlers at Washington Square Park all Gentlemen?
I don't see being able to play Chess well as any kind of deficiency. It could be that it's just someone's hobby. It doesn't have to mean they spiraled into madness, Bobby Fisher style.
(I can play chess, but not well, so I personally don't care about either half of that quote as it applies to me)
Poor performance of the single implementation.
A single implementation.
Leaky ref counted GC, but 'luckily' the syntax for references is so clunky that nobody does anything complicated enough that it really matters.
Bolted on object oriented features that never got the love they needed at a time when oo languages were sweeping the world.
Most of the wizards decamping to a new language (Perl6) that was 'developed' for years without an actual implementation to keep them grounded.
$_ is inscrutable if you haven't studied perl, but the same thing would happen to anyone who sees a python decorator for the first time. what does "else: do after a while loop in python? Only people who know python know what it does (and I suspect most don't). The different quoting operators are also trivial to learn. In comparison, yield from python is also simple syntax but the semantics are much more involved.
BEGIN? Take 60 seconds to read what it means. And if you knew awk, you'd not have to do that, as it was directly lifted from awk.
And yet, as the industry grew and all sorts of people from all sorts of backgrounds converged in this space, the tolerance and appetite for funky/terse waned in favor of explicit/verbose/accessible. It's probably for the better in the end, but it did feel a little bit like the mom-and-pop store on the corner that had weird pickled things at the register and a meemaw in the back got replaced by a generic Circle K with a lesser soul.
It certainly was the major factor in how I connected the dots!
Haven’t really thought about it until now, but I suppose having Larry Wall and Randal Schwartz telling you to RTFM guides your early development in a certain manner.
I certainly have never considered myself a developer or programmer though. I can pick up enough syntax to get a quick hack done or start a MVP to demo my ideas, but I leave the “big boy” dev stuff to the professionals who can run circles around me.
I'm sure there are people who started in a language and later found something that made more sense. I'm just reflecting on what I've found in my experience.
I wish bash was the thing that was dying. As an industry, we need to make better choices.
This is an amazing point that I haven't seen anyone else make about languages in this way.
As someone who got into the industry right after Perl's heyday and never learned or used it but learned programming from some former Perl power users, Perl has a pre-corporate/anarchic/punk feel about it that is completely opposite to something like Golang that feels like it was developed by a corporation, for a corporation. Perl is wacky, but it feels alive (the language itself, if not the community). By contrast, Golang feels dead, soulless.
That made me laugh. Unlike actually working with Perl references, which made me want to cry.
That is just how I felt about Perl (4 years full time dev in the 2000s) and how I now feel about https://raku.org (aka Perl6). Anyway, I tried to gather some fellow feelings here about 18 months ago:
https://rakujourney.wordpress.com/2024/05/22/perl-love-notes...
It is sad that Perl became so despised after the error of preannouncing a non-compatible upgrade. I understand that people couldn't wait. But Raku is here now and it is worth a second look imo.
Rubyists vs. Pythonistas isn't any better.
Programming languages as counter-cultural lifestyle choices is pretty "cringe" as the kids say.
The Perl community introduced the world to the first language module repositories via CPAN. No more manually hunting down tarballs off FTP servers
As a language, Perl is extremely expressive, which is amazing for one-off scripts, and awful for code that's meant to be shared and/or reread. For pure text-munging, Perl is still unbeaten, when using Perl-Compatible regexes in other languages, I feel the language getting in my way.
You can write easy-to-read Perl (TIMTOWTDI, and all that), but it doesn't force you like Go (small language size) or Python (by convention and culture, on what counts as 'Pythonic')
When at University the academic running the programming language course was adamant the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis applied to programming language. ie language influences the way you think.
Eh, in different ways. Ruby people often felt a little smug/over-emotive about how much joy using their tool could bring programmers. TFA is spot on about Perl: Perl folks often felt cliquish, arrogant, defensive. Python people are at times patronizing or overly dismissive.
And in all of those communities the biggest difference was how many people in the community had those dysfunctions, versus the rest—the vast majority of each language’s users who were using it, sharing techniques or code, answering questions about it without being jerks.
Where Perl fell down for me was that its community and people I knew who used it had a much higher chance of evidencing those crappy behaviors. More bad apples—not many in the grander scheme, but enough more to be noticed.
There’s a whole lot of words popularly excised (as you just did) from that line of the Zen to create a false polar opposite to Perl’s TMTOWTDI that was never actually part of Python’s philosophy.
The actual line from the Zen of Python is: “There should be one—and preferably only one—obvious way to do it.” (omissions in italics).
But those who remember the regulars of, say, efnet #perl (THIS ISN'T A HELP CHANNEL), there was a dearth of kindness for sure. I was probably part of it too, because that was the culture! This is where the wizards live, why are you here asking us questions?
Like cms, I'm also hesitant to name names, but the folks I'm thinking of were definitely perl-famous in their day.
There were also a bunch of great people in the community, and they helped me launch my career in tech in the 90s, and I have close internet friends from that community to this day (and great memories of some who have passed on). But there were definitely also jerks.
man 3pm Errno
my $fh;
unless (open($fh, "<", "/fangorn/spouse")) {
if ($!{ENOENT}) {
warn "Get a wife!\n";
} else {
warn "This path is barred: $!";
}
}
Perl and some of Perl's quirks will make more sense once you realise that it is deeply rooted in UNIX command line utilities, UNIX conventions and some UNIX shell defaults, except when it is not, i.e.
- What is `$_`?
- What is this BEGIN block at the start of this Perl file? Why is that necessary?
- What does chomp do when it's just on its own line, with no arguments given to it?
Chet Ramey became the primary maintainer of Bash in the early 1990s and is the sole author of every bash update (and Readline) since then. That would be an enormous task for a team of 100, no less a team of one.
I've become quite a fan (after struggling mightily with its seemingly millions of quirks.
Those days were different. You could say what people are doing in months to years today, in many ways people back then were doing in days to weeks.
Pace and ambition of shipping has not only faded, that very culture is non existent. You don't see people building the next Facebook or Amazon these days, do you?
I remember managers asking Java programmers how much time it would take to get something done, and get timelines on months and years. They would come to us Perl programmers and get it done in a week.
The era didn't last long. I would joke around our team saying, ideally a Java programmer with 10 years experience was somewhat like like a Perl programmer with 1 year experience. This was one of the big reasons, most of these enterprise coders wanted Perl gone.
I write bash scripts only because I can rely on it being there.
The Pragmatic Programmers had just started praising Ruby, so I opted for the that over Perl, and just went with it ever since. Hated PHP and didn't like Python's whitespace thing. I never Ruby on Rails'd either. That said my first interactive website was effectively a hello world button with cgi/perl.
But trying to learn to code from reading other peoples perl scripts was way harder than the (then) newer language alternatives.
Now I'm over 50 none of that is nearly as important. I remember being young and strongly opininated, this vs. that - its just part of the journey, and the culture. It also explains the current FizzBuzz in CSS minimisation post. We do because we can, not necessarily because we should.