
And suddenly, you're hip - Phra
http://blogs.perl.org/users/su-shee/2011/01/and-suddenly-youre-hip.html
======
msy
Thing is, while both Ruby & Vim have been driven by what she's describing she
neatly sidestepped why those movements got started in the first place. Ruby
gained huge traction primarily via Rails because working on PHP is unenjoyable
to many and Ruby is a really pleasant language to work with. Vim's recent
resurgence can largely be traced to development of Textmate grinding to a
complete halt. Textmate's rise a few years ago was due to BBEdit failing to
evolve. Git beats seven shades of shit out of SVN. Erlang provides a proven
answer to concurrency issues. Javascript is the only choice for the ever more
important front-end side of web development. Each of these shifts of
development momentum have rational, logical underpinnings.

The buzz, the screen casts and other errata are a consequence of a lot of
people making the same logical, reasoned choice and talking about it in
public. I cannot think of anything that's changed in Perl that'd justify any
such interest. I admit that may be my ignorance. Making sexy screencasts might
get a little traffic but you can't astroturf wave of developer momentum with
them.

~~~
Su-Shee
Sure, there are plenty of reasons of the whys and whens - on the other hand,
we could easily ask "why didn't everyone choose Emacs when textmate's
development came to a halt" or "Why didn't people choose Python as their web
language of choice when they didn't like PHP" or "Why not Bazaar instead of
SVN" or why Ryan Dahl chose JavaScript as a base language for Node.js and not
any of Python, Ruby, Perl, Scheme, Lisp or Lua - but JavaScript - and so on.
(As others already pointed out below so I'm summing this up in one sentence
here..) Thankfully we have plenty of options to choose from nowadays.

And yet I'm still convinced that the choice of Git over Bazaar has something
to do with the smoothness of Github and with "It's from Linus!", the choice of
Ruby/RoR with the image 37signals so nicely projects, that JavaScript's recent
rise and massive change in perception comes thanks to Douglas Crockford and
Erlang would have probably stayed in its niche if it wasn't for CouchDB.

So I was surprised and amazed by the change in perception of Vim over the last
year and therefore I blogged about it.

And yes, along your examples Perl faced a similar situation around 2000 (so
thanks for the well chosen examples) and decided to do Perl 6 to re-ignite the
Perl spark. (Let's set aside for a moment wether or not it worked and what
happened after that and boy am I sure the second I hit the submit button
people will _exactly_ totally get into this subject.. ;)

I also didn't ask wether or not one really wants the success of the masses or
if it might be a good thing to stay in a well-defined niche with a community
of your choice, creating your own culture - as for example shows the Linux
distribution Slackware very happily year by year and to a great satisfaction
of its users.

I also didn't mention how much it might have to do with the age of developers,
wether some changes plainly might be a generation thing of "first generation
web developers" and "second generation web developers" or how much Apple's
regained success does play into all that.

But as we can see within the comments below, old Perl cliches aren't really
dead and get repeated all over wether or not the subject was Perl's marketing
and not Perl's qualities (or the perceived lack thereof...)

Or maybe we all get kicked our asses by Lisp next year - thanks to Peter
Seibel's Practical Lisp Programming book or "Land of Lisp" and of course Paul
Graham and Emacs wins all over. ;)

~~~
seanalltogether
Predictably Irrational talks about what you are describing here. You see,
despite many of these technologies having a smaller install base, what they
have done is create a new anchor in technology, which allows them to
monopolize the conversation. The iPhone and Rails are the most significant
anchors within the past 5 years. You can't make Perl popular by acting like
rock stars and making videos on youtube, you can only making Perl popular by
creating a new technological anchor for others to hook themselves to.

~~~
alnewkirk
I agree with this whole-heartedly. My sentiments exactly.

------
po
I used to be a huge Perl advocate; I loooved perlmonks back in the day. (Just
tried to log back into it after probably over 10 years but the forgot password
link doesn't work) I read the Camel book cover-to-cover and giggled at the
footnotes.

While I loved the language, I can't imagine going back to it. Now perl
programs look like cat typing to me. It was way too expressive. The TIMTOWDI
mentality meant that I could never read code I didn't write myself, and even
some that I did. It was terse and dense like poetry and hard to understand -
like poetry. To really "know" the language meant knowing a huge surface area
full of exceptions and special conditions.

Sure, you could limit yourself to certain best-practices and styles but it was
like being handing the keys to the porsche and told to only drive 35. At every
turn, the language was begging you to flex that newly acquired knowledge of
special syntax. The obfuscation contests, the perl poetry, the quines… Many
languages have this failing in my opinion and it certainly matters more when
you're working in a large team (hence, rigid boring old Java) but Perl taught
me what it was like to go too far down that path.

It is what I would call a write-only language.

~~~
sigzero
You are describing a Perl mentality that really doesn't exist today and is
only really touted by people that used Perl "back in the day". The community
mindset has changed a lot in the last couple of years. Now, that community is
trying to show that change to the world...and slowly...it is working.

------
cturner

        where btw is A NICE HIP FEMALE PHRASE I COULD PRINT
        ON A SHIRT? 
    

I'm a vim ballerina!

    
    
        "we" are literally invisible to the bigger public, not
        matter how much CPAN grows and no matter how much #perl
        is the biggest IRC channel on freenode.
    

Secret societies are cool.

~~~
rbxbx
I don't see why females can't be ninjas and rockstars, or are these things
just not as appealing to the "fairer sex"?

~~~
michaelchisari
I thought this part of the essay was strange, because they sure as hell can
be. Courtney Love, Brody Dalle, Joan Jett.

Not to mention: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kunoichi>

------
Samuel_Michon
From the article:

 _"The iPhone isn't the highest sold smartphone"_

Sure it is. At least in the U.S., Japan, New Zealand and Australia. In most
other countries, Nokia is the most popular smartphone _vendor_ , but because
they offer hundreds of different models, I doubt Nokia has one specific model
that sells better than the iPhone 4.

[U.S.] [http://www.engadget.com/2010/11/01/canalys-iphone-becomes-
mo...](http://www.engadget.com/2010/11/01/canalys-iphone-becomes-most-popular-
smartphone-in-the-us-andro/)

[Australia]
[http://www.idc.com/about/viewpressrelease.jsp?containerId=pr...](http://www.idc.com/about/viewpressrelease.jsp?containerId=prAU22603210&sectionId=null&elementId=null&pageType=SYNOPSIS)

[New Zealand]
[http://computerworld.co.nz/news.nsf/telecommunications/andro...](http://computerworld.co.nz/news.nsf/telecommunications/android-
knocking-on-iphones-door)

[Japan] [http://www.businessweek.com/news/2010-04-23/apple-iphone-
cap...](http://www.businessweek.com/news/2010-04-23/apple-iphone-
captures-72-of-japan-smartphone-market-update3-.html)

------
megamark16
I learned vim over emacs because vi is installed on every linux machine I have
ever touched, so when I sit down to a server and I need to edit a config file,
I try vim, then I use vi, and I always find one or the other. I just opened
Terminal on my Ubuntu 10.10 machine and typed "emacs" and it informed me that
it wasn't installed, but was available in a slew of packages.

~~~
astrofinch
I never understood this rationale for learning vim. Do you really spend a lot
of your development time on random Unix boxes you and all of your friends lack
root access to?

~~~
wladimir
These days, probably not that much, with the advent of virtualisation. But a
decade ago there were a lot of shared shell servers in use with only a minimal
install and a small per-user quota. So the rationale made sense...

------
pyre
A suggestion for a Perl screencast: using the Perl debugger. ~1.5 years ago my
friend found a bug in the Perl debugger that had rendered it basically non-
functional for several releases. I think it's telling that no one picked up on
that for so long (i.e. no one is using the Perl debugger, probably because
they don't know it exists and/or how to use it).

[ IIRC, it might be the bug under:
<http://perldoc.perl.org/perl5100delta.html> ; search for 'PERLIO_DEBUG' ]

------
alnewkirk
I guess I'll throw my hat in the ring. Perl is awesome, and since I've been
using it practically my entire career and have contributed quite a substantial
amount of time developing libraries for CPAN I suppose it my core-competency.

Bottom line, CPAN is awesome ... but lets not be a one trick pony. When you
hear things over-and-over you should probably take notice (and maybe even
onus). "Perl is not newbie friendly, past or present (modern)", "Perl
community is not friendly (rtfm)", "Perl is not used for the new web", "Perl
has no good IDE", etc.

I'd like to see Perl restored to its former glory because it is an incredibly
versatile language. IMHO, I think Perl developers need to develop more purty
public-facing tools, e.g. Websites, Web Apps, Desktop Apps, etc. .. see Lacuna
Expanse for example.

CPAN Modules are not public-facing (or are to a point) and do nothing towards
altering the perception of Perl.

------
va_coder
Why Ruby? is a pretty damn good presentation. He talks about how the benefits
include the culture, as well as the language.

<http://ontwik.com/ruby/david-hansson-why-ruby/>

~~~
edu
I came to comment just the same. I used to work with Perl for about 4+ years,
and now I'm on my way to exit a PHP work after 2 years. My next project will
be in Ruby and this presentation helped me to rationalize the guts I had for
Ruby (I've been playing a little bit with it).

The idea of making tools that are joyful to use to the programmers (wether
it's the programming language, the editor, the SCM...) is something that
appeals a lot to me, and it's something that (unfortunately) Perl lacks,
basically due to it's syntax.

The community around the languages also affects, both have a great community
around with hundreds of incredibly smart people with it's own quirkinesses,
but the Ruby quirkinesses are more appealing to me (think DHH or _why) than
Perl's (think Larry Wall or all the JAPH/golf...).

~~~
Su-Shee
This is bascially what I was talking about.

Though the Ruby community managed somehow to drive off _why and someone like
Zed Shaw if I remember correctly. If that really appeals to you...

~~~
danieldon

        if I remember correctly
    

You don't. _why left open source for unknown reasons.

~~~
pharrington
Don't really wanna go down here, but _why left after someone claimed to post
his IRL name/info

~~~
danieldon
That's certainly one leading theory, and probably the most likely. However,
that happened earlier in the summer, a month or more before he actually shut
everything down. There are other possible theories, eg, in his last tweets he
lamented about feeling left behind by the progress of open source, or the
theory that he planned it all along based on the Poignant Guide's ending.

No matter which of those reasons it was, it's pretty baseless to claim that he
took down all of his websites, comics and open source software in a variety of
languages including one he created due to some mysterious, unmentioned,
irreconcilable beef the Ruby community, especially considering he was one of
the most influentual people in defining that community.

------
flatline
'I've always wondered how those mechanism of "being THE it-language" or "the
tool the cool kids use these days" or "success" in terms of "spreading
everywhere" really works.'

Just having CPAN isn't enough. There need to be new and interesting projects
that stand on their own and are current and relevant. I'm not saying there
aren't, I just don't read about them on HN, reddit, etc. Perl was always about
making things easy, and it wasn't hard to see how a perl script was better
than a cgi handler in C. How is writing a DSL interpreter in Perl cool
compared to, say, Ruby? How do the Perl MVC frameworks make things
easier/better than rails or django?

~~~
Su-Shee
That's totally not the point with all our languages these days - Ruby, Python,
Perl - next year JavaScript will probably have a similar ecosystem of modules
as we do as productive as the community writes code. Who doesn't have some
amazing web framework these days?!

The differences boil down to details, architecture, stability, speed,
security, documentation and the like - but seriously, do you really think some
route handler in _programming language_ X or Y does make _any_ difference?

I personally didn't like the philosophy of RoR - I liked Merb better and got
really put off by its community (and still am) and specifically by blog
postings selling me shit as gold and all this "awesome <insert some simple
basic not even well crafted solution to an every day problem here>" selling -
but this is a matter of _taste_ and _personal preferences_ and don't really
count as an argument.

Of course you can write a damn DSL in Perl in any way you like - otherwise a
project like Moose wouldn't even be possible which wrote an entire metaobject
OO system in Perl.

My point was that people usally plainly don't _know_ about those things and
blindly think that PHP is the only language you can do "Web" with, Ruby the
only language to write a DSL in and Python the only language well I have no
idea what Python might be the only language for. ;)

------
lwhi
Marketing re-energised the web after the period of downtime after the dot-com
crash (O'Reilly and Web 2.0), I'm sure it could similarly re-energise Perl.

EDIT: If Web 2.0 wasn't a well crafted marketing campaign I don't know what
is.

~~~
julius_geezer
Now your edit is a phrase that would make a great tee shirt!

------
varjag
Also, Ruby is a better language than Perl. No amount of campaigning will
change that.

(Before anyone follows-up with the usual "the right tool for the job", it's
not the point here. There are good screwdrivers and bad screwdrivers).

~~~
lsc
in terms of stability? really?

I hear this a lot about Python. And I know a little bit about Python; I know
less about ruby. But the thing of it is, from a SysAdmin perspective, Python
is where Perl was in 2000. In 2000, you had differing versions of perl that
were close enough to step on oneanother, but still so incompatible that you
had to maintain one version of perl for your base OS tools, and usually
another version of perl for every major application you used.

Perl has stabilized to the point where this is no longer a problem. I can run
nearly everything on system perl without worrying about it. Python, on the
other hand, I've had to wrangle with many RHEL systems that have two versions
of python (one, because the RHEL base system requires a staggeringly ancient
version of python, and then the other for the application the server was
running.)

Python just isn't "done" in the way perl is. In five or ten years, sure. But
for now, it's still a pain in the ass.

Hell, I'd bet money that at this point, perl5 has fewer memory leaks and other
programming errors in the compiler than Ruby does, just because people have
been pounding on it for so long.

~~~
mfukar
I'm going to draw an analogy from Larry Wall's own words: Python 3 is to
Python 2 what Perl 6 is to Perl 5, a different language.

Just because you had a bad experience with Python legacy code (yes, RHEL
sucks), doesn't mean you get to discredit the language. What is it about the
_language_ you find unfinished? I'd be 99% certain any issue you're going to
mention is actively being worked on.

~~~
berntb
Interesting... Are people using Python 3, now?

(Hint: I don't think the grandfather comment was about Python 3.)

And different languages doesn't say much. :-)

Perl 6, compared to e.g. Python 2/3, is a _really_ ambitious undertaking. But
OK, with the backporting going on, Perl 5 might end up being similar to Perl
6... :-)

~~~
skybrian
I'm sure some are, but it's not mainstream. For example, the Django team
hasn't started porting to Python 3 yet. For now, you can ignore Python 3.

------
pwpwp
Nice article, although I'd fear a "Project for a New Perl Century". If there
were an International Criminal Court for Programmer Rights, Perl should be the
first language tried for crimes against programmerdom.

~~~
sigzero
Any "crimes" were the fault of the programmer and not the language. Period.
End of story.

------
mfukar
I don't get it; when the Perl folk thought they had to reach the masses,
instead of making Perl 5 more accessible to newbies, instead of covering Perl
events (a comment on the blog mentions some specialized hardware for doing so
- lol), instead of actively pushing Perl projects, they decided to come up
with Perl 6!

Yet Perl 6, except from some blog posts describing its utter dominance over
Perl 5 performance, still hasn't seen the coverage/promotion it deserves (I'm
assuming here, because I'm not using it).

Maybe there are some lessons to be learned here.

~~~
chromatic
_I don't get it_

To start: there exist Perl programmers who have worked on both Perl 5 and Perl
6, specifically to make Perl 5 more accessible and to make Perl 6 more
imminent. Don't assume the entire Perl community is a hivemind with a single
shared purpose.

~~~
mfukar
I don't; and that wasn't my point.

~~~
chromatic
To whom does the pronoun "they" refer, if not "the Perl folk"?

~~~
mfukar
I started replying, but I'm not going to engage in a discussion of syntax and
semantics. Feel free to downvote me.

------
pacemkr
I'm just getting into Ruby and converting to vim as my primary editor, and I
didn't even know that this is a "hip" thing to do. All of a sudden I feel
trashy for making logical choices.

I think the author misjudged why people like me choose Ruby and vim -- choices
that have nothing to do with each other, btw.

I'm a fan of terseness and readability. Ruby has a reputation for both. I've
never heard the following phrases spoken: "Perl is great for writing DSL's."
"Perl is very readable."

The most amazing experience has been going on GitHub on day one, reading the
Rails, Haml, Sinatra, Tilt, you name it, code and being able to understand
virtually any part of it. This is not only a testament to the language, but
also a testament to the quality of the frameworks and the API's that are being
produced with it. Show me a web framework written in Perl that I can dig into
and understand with zero Perl experience.

Vim, on the other hand, is a sour-sweet topic. Here is the only reason I'm
using vim: everything else sucks ___. Vim also sucks ____ because in 2011 it
is still a text editor that can't copy paste using the "normal people"
shortcuts. I'm looking forward to the day I finally customize vim enough to
match Notepad in usability.

As much as vim usability sucks, I know that I can spend a year customizing it
(and it will take a year) and be able to rely on it for the rest of my life.
In contrast, there is no such incentive to invest into the monstrosities
riding over the JVM (not calling names).

Also, screencasts are great because I read all day and its tiring, physically
tiring. Sitting back, relaxing my eyes and being educated while I sip on a
coffee and have a cookie is my idea of fun. Screencasts are free, bite sized,
training. By the author's logic Khan Academy is worthless as an educational
tool because most of it is written somewhere.

~~~
nickknw
Regarding vim and "normal people" shortcuts, if 'source mswin.vim' doesn't
work for you, here are the mappings I have in my .vimrc to give it the normal
CTRL-C, CTRL-X, and CTRL-V, as well as sharing the clipboard with windows:

    
    
        " share clipboard
        set clipboard=unnamed  
    
        " CTRL-V is Paste in insert mode
        imap <C-V>		"+gpa   
        " CTRL-C is Copy, CTRL-X is Cut, in visual mode
        vmap <C-C>		"+y
        vmap <C-x>		"+d
        " Use CTRL-Q to do what CTRL-V used to do
        noremap <C-Q>		<C-V>

~~~
pacemkr
Thank you for sharing that. I've never heard of source mswin.vim. The standard
copy paste shortcuts are platform agnostic at this point, hell, even my phone
uses them (webOS). This is where I've found vim and emacs incredibly
frustrating out of the box.

------
JonnieCache
Communication skills correlate with social standing. News at 11.

:)

~~~
lwhi
Sure, maybe the idea is obvious - I suppose the interesting question is 'how
can a transformation occur?', which is something the article tries to address.

------
pmikal
Hip or un-hip, ChargeSmart loves perl - developers looking for work at a San
Francisco based funded payments start-up should email me their details, pmikal
[at] ChargeSmart.com.

------
bootload
_"... Err, yeah well of course Vim is a really nice programming editor, man -
why do you think we use it?! ..."_

traditionally because if you are on a machine with limited memory vi, vim is
the only editor that will load and there is no way you will get me using 'ed'
again ~ <http://www.faqs.org/docs/artu/ch13s02.html#id2963445>

------
xsltuser2010
Maybe you should market Perl as uncool and weird and without annoying yuppies
like DHH. ;P

------
rgbrgb
This article kind of made me want to get better at Vim.

