
Confessions of a recovering Perl Hacker - peteretep
https://opensource.com/article/18/7/confessions-recovering-perl-hacker
======
cutler
It always puzzled me why so many Perl devs moved to Python when Ruby is a much
closer fit. Sysadmin tools can't be the reason because Ruby led the way with
Chef and Puppet. Perl was my first real programming language back in 2002 and
"Programming Perl" was my bible. Larry Wall is a wonderful gentle giant of a
leader but unfortunately the community imploded over never-ending debates
about OOP and MOP then there was the 15-year Perl 6 energy drain. If Perl had
established a web framework to compete with Rails and Django it might have
survived but Catalyst is an ugly beast and Mojolicious somehow never gained
the momentum required despite being a much better option for web development.

~~~
lmm
> Sysadmin tools can't be the reason because Ruby led the way with Chef and
> Puppet.

Chef's first release was 2009; Puppet 2005, by which point many people had
already moved to Python.

My experience is that Ruby was virtually unheard of in the English-speaking
world until the rise of Rails (post-2005); at any point in time there are
thousands of programming languages "out there" but only a handful have
mainstream recognition; back in the 2000s Python was a known name in a way
that Ruby just wasn't.

~~~
jhbadger
I hear this a lot, but I have to wonder if it is just the bias of web
developers who never looked at it before Rails. I started using Ruby in 2001
in Montreal where other colleagues were using it. We were all former Perl
people who had gotten fed up with Perl and we didn't care for the inconsistent
object orientation of Python.

~~~
lmm
I'm not a web dev and have never used Rails, but I hadn't even heard of Ruby
until Rails and Puppet got popular. I'm sure every language has a few people
who heard about it in its early days, but I do think Rails was the catalyst
for Ruby going mainstream, even to non-web people.

------
dahart
> The thing about Perl is that it just starts small, with a regexp here, a
> text-file line counter there. Nothing that couldn't have been managed quite
> easily in Bash or Sed or Awk. But once you've written a couple of scripts,
> you're in—there's no going back. Long-term Perl users remember how we
> started, and we see the newbs going the same way.

Somehow I never graduated; I write scripts occasionally but Perl one-liners
have been my favorite way to use Perl for like 20 years. For most of that
time, I’ve been meaning to get more fluent with awk & sed, but whenever the
need comes up to get something real done, I use the Perl I know.

------
lmm
> I discovered after she handed in the results that it hadn't produced the
> correct results, but I didn't mind. It was tight, it was elegant, it was
> beautiful. It was Perl.

Sounds like a lot of Perl codebases. Tight, elegant, beautiful, incorrect
results.

------
rurban
For my current reverse engineering project Perl was not good enough anymore
for the easy parts, so I had to switch to picat, for some tricky constraints
solving. Similar to Prolog, but with a SAT solver, and very
Perl/python/Haskell like syntax. Actually the syntax is almost the same as my
Perl VM: potion.

------
cafard
Hah!

The front cover came off my copy of _Programming Perl_ , detached by long use.
Having said that, these days I seem to write more Python, since that's what
the young know.

------
gargarplex
Perl is near and dear to my heart as well. The main thing I miss about the
perl community were the japhs.

------
habeebtc
What he really needs is a script to automate reading the camel book for him.

------
usermac
Love this story/link. Perl is my go-t0 lang as well. ^_^

~~~
usermac
OH, and I too comment my Perl code heavily and always.

------
Gotperl
Waited years for my username to be relevant here :)

