zlacker

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+(OP)
Yeah the joke was, Perl is write-only.

>>chrisw+7
Write-only perhaps, but with perl you only have to write it once and it'll run forever, anywhere. No breaking on updates, no containers, no special version of Perl just for $application, just the system perl.

Because of this, in practice, the amount of system administration mantainence and care needed for perl programs is far, far less than other languages like python where you actually do have to go in and re-write it all the time due to dep hell and rapid changes/improvements to the language. For corporate application use cases these re-writes are happening anyway all the time so it doesn't matter. But for system administration it's a significant difference.

>>superk+V1
There was really only one big forced rewrite, 2->3, and ironically Perl was killed by failure to do the same with 5->6.

I agree that python versioning and especially library packaging is the worst part of the language, though.

>>RayFra+(OP)
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.

>>superk+V1
Agreed! My father (RIP) absolutely loved Perl and could do amazing things with it in seemingly impossibly-few characters. I got reasonably proficient w/ regex but never came close to his wizardry. Much respect for those in his rarified company.

>>creer+d7
> 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.

>>creer+d7
There wasn't pressure to write concise code exactly, but if you posted your code somewhere the odds were good that somebody would reply with a way to do the same thing with less code, followed by someone else who managed to shave several lines/characters off of that, etc.

While almost all of the time it was all just people having fun (perl is fun and play was encouraged) and not an admonishment of the code you'd posted or an example of how it should have been written I can see how some folks might have gotten that impression. Especially if they were new to perl and were more used to languages where TIMTOWTDI wasn't thing

>>Superm+Ea
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.

>>creer+Tb
Those experts were horrendously vicious. I can name them and can still describe their dismissive cruelty, since I spent ten years socializing nonstop in the Perl5 core communities (and have a CPAN id, and have an Authors entry in Perl5 core). Think “Linus before he learned to stop insulting people’s worth and focus on critiquing their work instead”. It was absolutely intended as a form of cultural propagation: I can do this more succinctly, so You Should Be Ashamed Before Me. If somehow you weren’t exposed to that aspect of it, I envy you.

Interestingly, that same prideful “my way is so obviously better that it’s a ridiculous waste of my time considering yours” ended up carrying forward to Mozilla, which was launched in part by cultural exports of the Perl5 conservative-libertarian community, and for a decade developer hiring was filtered for cultural sameness, leaving a forest of TMTOWTDI trees that viewed meadows as an aberration to be reforested back to their sameness.

>>superk+V1
Aren't perl modules locked to the exact version they were compiled in ?

I've met many time some error "haha nope, wrong version, perl 5.31.7 required"

>>altair+1e
You indeed ran into toxic environments. I don't feel that the common, new perl programmer intake path was anything like that. Not what I ever ran into.

Support in forums and such was needlessly short in using RTFM as an answer. People could have pasted a one paragraph pointer to the documentation intake path and that would have helped.

>>creer+d7
Code golfing originated in perl.

There was strong cultural pressure to be able to write perl in as few bytes as possible, ideally as a CLI one-liner. Books[1] were written on the topic.

https://www.thriftbooks.com/w/perl-one-liners-130-programs-t...

>>creer+Tj
It was EFnet/#perl which included most of the core development team. I don’t really have experience with the non-core social environment, sorry.

>>syncsy+fp
One-liners is one of the ways you can use perl. You can also use it as the embedded language in some larger project. As perl CGI. As mod_perl. etc. There is no "cultural pressure" to use any of these. You can choose to mess around with one-liners and you can choose to spend time shaving a few characters off your code. Or not. None of this is the one true way. This is not python.

>>syncsy+fp
> There was strong cultural pressure to be able to write perl in as few bytes as possible

Hard disagree. Many Perl programmers enjoyed engaging in code golf (always just for fun, in my experience), but in my nearly 30 years of programming Perl, I never encountered anything that I would call pressure to do so -- not from anyone.

>>creer+Tj
Don't forget many people were still on dial-up and long forum posts were probably discouraged in favor of RTFM or other terse reply.