
Erik Naggum's Perl Rant - biot
http://www.schnada.de/grapt/eriknaggum-perlrant.html
======
astrange
My memories of the 90s were that Perl programmers were helpful and got things
done, whereas if you asked a Lisp user anything they would tell you 1. you
were wrong 2. everyone else is also wrong 3. you need to study another five
years before doing anything, or sometimes 4. you should kill yourself.

Hopefully now that we live in the world of the future we can use him as an
example of how not to write mailing list posts.

(There were one or two angry Europeans on the ffmpeg list who got things done,
but the behavior and getting things done were both seemingly caused by having
lots of free time since they were unemployable…)

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maxlybbert
On the one hand, this rant is 14 years old now, and discusses a version of
Perl that is vastly different from what exists today. On the other hand, Perl
14 years ago did have serious problems, as did its competition, and the rant
makes some decent points.

For what it's worth, I can do the exercises from SICP (
[https://mitpress.mit.edu/sicp/](https://mitpress.mit.edu/sicp/) ) without
much difficulty in modern Perl.

~~~
logan-campbell
Brilliant! Can you please share the code? I'd love to see it.

~~~
maxlybbert
I haven't done them all, although it might be fun to do so. A big part of the
book focuses on closures and passing functions to functions, which are both
supported in Perl.

For the time being, Higher Order Perl might satisfy you (
[http://hop.perl.plover.com/book/](http://hop.perl.plover.com/book/) ). It's
only 9 years old now, so it's relatively modern.

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cjensen
A good rant should have specific examples for its points. Or maybe even one
example for at least one point.

This is not a good rant. It's just a bunch of disparaging assertions.

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AnimalMuppet
Wow. He can totally rant about how evil Perl is and how good Lisp is (without
any data, as cjensen noted), but he can't manage to capitalize the start of
his sentences. I'm supposed to take his opinion on which language is good?

~~~
jack-r-abbit
> _he can 't manage to capitalize the start of his sentences_

Having no clue who this cat is (well... was) I had to look him up to figure
out if I cared about his 14 year old rant against Perl. One thing about him
that stuck with me after reading was that he did that on purpose because it
was easier to type. But that doesn't really make it better.

