Sorry to say, but I find the criticism in this form to be quite meaningless. What does a motto have to do with any kind of validity for a certain purpose? Python has the "Zen of Python", does this inherently make it a better solution?
"There are many ways to skin a cat" is older than computers, and it applies to basically any programming language. Some languages make it harder to do it in a different manner, some allow it, but don't offer it without including some additional package. C has no hash tables, but it's not that hard to get them, for example.
I'd go so far as to say, that plenty of current programming languages allow more ways to do a thing out of the box than Perl. What mythical language does offer a straight and completely obvious path from problem to solution? Haven't I ascended enough in the halls of programmer-dom to be told of this coding panacea?
And why would this be particularly bad for DevOps? Are DevOps programmers worse and/or more easily confused?
Just recently we had a thread here about different ways to remove duplicates from arrays, and that was done in Golang, devops Holy Grail du jour.
> And why would this be particularly bad for DevOps? Are DevOps programmers worse and/or more easily confused?
DevOps is all about consistency and readability... neither of which are strong points of Perl. Perl was the de-facto cross-platform DevOps language in the 90s (seriously quite a few Mac programs of the day installed Perl as a dependency). There’s a reason the industry moved away from it 15 years ago.
I’ve been building in Perl5 for over 20 years, and it’s really easy to paint yourself into an edge case where things don’t quite work the way you expect them to. Everyone who writes Perl learned it a slightly different way, which makes managing an active codebase of Perl “fun” — it has a tendency to devolve into spaghetti code over time once you get a lot of contributors.
"There are many ways to skin a cat" is older than computers, and it applies to basically any programming language. Some languages make it harder to do it in a different manner, some allow it, but don't offer it without including some additional package. C has no hash tables, but it's not that hard to get them, for example.
I'd go so far as to say, that plenty of current programming languages allow more ways to do a thing out of the box than Perl. What mythical language does offer a straight and completely obvious path from problem to solution? Haven't I ascended enough in the halls of programmer-dom to be told of this coding panacea?
And why would this be particularly bad for DevOps? Are DevOps programmers worse and/or more easily confused?
Just recently we had a thread here about different ways to remove duplicates from arrays, and that was done in Golang, devops Holy Grail du jour.