Comment by jasode | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jasode | Hacker News Reader

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>I gravitate back to sigils because your point, that sigils' terseness contributed majorly to Perl's decline,

I didn't tie sigils to the "decline" -- I tied it to the survey's "dislike". I also didn't claim Perl sigils is what drove Python/Ruby adoption. I never claimed a logical cause and effect between sigils and Perl's decline.

Indeed, the Rust language adds a whole new taxonomy of sigils[1] and it's on the upswing in popularity. (Of course, someone will probably come along and think I claimed that "adding sigils to Rust contributed to its growing popularity".)

The decline of Perl's mindshare for new domains was totally separate from "sigils". The usage decline was a 2nd observation of why Perl topped the charts of "most disliked" languages.

>then why did the people who had that problem move to other languages that are even terser

You're asking that question because you're still focused on only one string length definition of "terse".

Let me try another way:

  strlen(Rust_code) > strlen(Python_code)

... and yet... Rust can still be perceived as more terse than Python. Why? Because special non-obvious symbols that "don't explain themselves" are perceived as terse. This leads to the paradox that adding to the text length makes it more terse. Lastly, not all opinions about Perl's reputation for terseness comes from Python/Ruby programmers.

[1] https://github.com/rust-lang/rust-wiki-backup/blob/master/Si...

> The decline of Perl's mindshare for new domains was totally separate from "sigils".

When you quoted someone saying "how Perl managed to become quite so profoundly disliked" and said "the conspicuous reasons seem to be a combination of: 1) PERL's usage of sigils," I took that to mean you were saying that sigils were a major reason that Perl isn't well-liked by as many people anymore. I'm sorry if that was a misunderstanding.

> Because special non-obvious symbols that "don't explain themselves" are perceived as terse.

The Merriam-Webster definition of 'terse' is 'using few words: devoid of superfluity.' It is not a synonym for noisy. 'my @list' is terser than 'List<T> list,' but both are wordier than better-liked-than-Perl languages like Python, Ruby, and Javascript, which is where Perl's mindshare went (I've been taking that last part as a given). I'm not claiming Perl isn't terse, I'm just saying that it was nonsensical to say that 'PERL's usage of sigils [...] makes code compact and terse.' Compared to C#, sure, but Perl was never competing with C#, and most of the mindshare it used to have didn't go to C#, so it's not really relevant. If the extra terseness (not noisiness) afforded by using sigils was a major reason for Perl's unpopularity, then Python, Ruby, and Javascript's popularity is very strange.

    print while (<>);

Is definitely terser than

    for line in fileinput.input():
        print(line)

But you'll notice there aren't even any sigils in the Perl version.

Sigils being ugly and Perl being too terse might both be problems it has, but they're different issues.

You may have made a mistake linking to this page for Rust; as the URL says, it's a backup: the only ones that exist today are *, &, and ', and the former work the same way they do in other systems languages. (With the exception that & is borrow checked but like, it's a pointer inside, same exact deal.)

We in fact removed these sigils from Rust because user feedback was extremely negative about them, and ' still gets a lot of complaints. Nobody has come up with something better though.

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