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Comment by ChrisMarshallNY | Hacker News Reader

That's a fun read.

I once wrote an entire CMS in Perl.

I still wake up, screaming, sometimes.

[UPDATE] It appears as if my flippant remark caused upset. I am sincerely sorry that this was the case. No offense was meant.

@peteretep, you have my sincere apology. It was a flippant remark. At the time I wrote it (mid-1990s), Perl was the best way to write portable server-side code. I took the time to learn it, and got fairly good at it. Since then, I have found my muse in other languages, but I sincerely did not want to give offense. I doubt that deleting the comment would help.

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I recently had to work out why some nodejs monstrosity wasn't working. Somewhere in the 68,746 files that made up the program there was a problem.

I rewrote it in a couple of hours in 393 lines of perl and 6 OS installed (so stable for the life of the OS) libraries.

I once wrote a vital satellite maneuver orchestration software, which had to parse various files and call models. Simultaneously the scariest and proudest moment in my career, but the alternative was Fortran or C.

FWIW, the originator of "Duff's Device" (an infamously counterintuitive C construct) claimed that "I feel a combination of pride and revulsion". O:-)

I came across Duff's Device as a student and to this day it's one of my favourite pieces of code. It's practically a piece of art!

Why didn't you write it in C?

Master Foo and the Ten Thousand Lines

Master Foo once said to a visiting programmer: “There is more Unix-nature in one line of [Perl] script than there is in ten thousand lines of C.”

The programmer, who was very proud of his mastery of C, said: “How can this be? C is the language in which the very kernel of Unix is implemented!”

Master Foo replied: “That is so. Nevertheless, there is more Unix-nature in one line of [Perl] script than there is in ten thousand lines of C.”

The programmer grew distressed. “But through the C language we experience the enlightenment of the Patriarch Ritchie! We become as one with the operating system and the machine, reaping matchless performance!”

Master Foo replied: “All that you say is true. But there is still more Unix-nature in one line of [Perl] script than there is in ten thousand lines of C.”

The programmer scoffed at Master Foo and rose to depart. But Master Foo nodded to his student Nubi, who wrote a line of [Perl] script on a nearby whiteboard, and said: “Master programmer, consider this [Perl one-liner]. Implemented in pure C, would it not span ten thousand lines?”

The programmer muttered through his beard, contemplating what Nubi had written. Finally he agreed that it was so.

“And how many hours would you require to implement and debug that C program?” asked Nubi.

“Many,” admitted the visiting programmer. “But only a fool would spend the time to do that when so many more worthy tasks await him.”

“And who better understands the Unix-nature?” Master Foo asked. “Is it he who writes the ten thousand lines, or he who, perceiving the emptiness of the task, gains merit by not coding?”

Upon hearing this, the programmer was enlightened.

Adapted from: http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/unix-koans/ten-thousand.ht...

All the usual reasons, such as cpan, terseness, interpreted nature, quick turnaround, etc

Fun fact: cPanel[0] is still written in Perl

[0]: https://www.cpanel.com/

Booking.com also

tbh, I'm still sad that Python won against Perl during the heyday. Perl was and is still a fun language.

Perl is cool but it's got a hell of a lot of cryptic operators for its syntax. They make sense after you learn them but for beginners it's clear why python gets picked up way easier. They're not having to think in symbols and stuff, it just looks more like a list of instructions rather than a mess of dollar signs and 'my' (my what? just not retrospectively intuitive...)

That said I like perl (And lately, awk/sed) a lot more for things that python is just SLOW at. Plus for systems-level scripts, considering that most linux/BSD installs you encounter on anything at all will have perl installed, let's say you encounter a router or something like that you need to work on somehow internally -- Do you even have room for another interpreter on there? Better be at least initiated in using perl if you want to hack on that. I've also recently found it really useful for rescuing an ancient database file format from the 1980s which was super handy considering other tools choked on it.

Perl might be weird, but it's logic and it makes sense. References are not automagical, but explicit, so you don't get an inconsistent function calling model. If you call a sub like `something(%h)`, it will get a copy of the hash. If you use `something(\%h)` the sub will receive a reference to access the hash instead. This is way better than Python or Java where everything is "pass-by-reference" until it isn't, and the fact a function won't modify the arguments you passed to it is basically a gentleman's agreement.

Perl is complex, but it is also rewarding when you use it for those tasks it's good at (like gluing code together and text processing).

Ive only used Perl for one story at work but I don't fully grok yet why we $ a @ or a %

Getting a hash passed by ref to a sub was a true syntactic challenge that I haven't experienced in a different language. Have to say though, using regex in Perl is chef's kiss

Because an array is a list of scalar, and an hash a map of scalars. If you want to access a scalar inside the list, you write $a[1], which means "the scalar at the first position of list @a". If it was @a[1] it would have been inconsistent, because then a @ expression would have returned a scalar and not a list.

> Plus for systems-level scripts

I still tend to use it for that.

Conversely, there's also so many things you can do in a perl (or awk/sed if performance or avoiding malloc by streaming data is necessary) oneliner in a shell script if you know some cool tricks. It's crazy how many resources are thrown into stuff like hadoop (literal ironic elephant logo) clusters to process CSV when dinky tools older than I am can zip through that data 1000x faster just by keeping it in the processor cache on my laptop

https://learnbyexample.github.io/learn_perl_oneliners/cover....

In my heart, Perl has won a long time ago. Python is nice and all, but it's too much of a jack of all trades language, that doesn't neither suck nor shine at anything.

Also, the fact you can write a Perl script, run it everywhere and just not concern yourself with versioning and stuff is beautiful. If one of my .sh script gets over 40 lines, it becomes a .pl file, that's the rule.

Yeah, same. I start off as a shell, but if it starts to get beyond simple text manipulation of variable, I switch it up.

If Perl had offered proper OO without all that convoluted bless stuff, offered proper linting, good data-science libs like pandas, easy concurrency, ergonomical web-frameworks to beat PHP and did not get lost in the "everything will be solved by Perl 6" argument, it could have ruled as the Camel of the Web.

Sadly it was not to be.

> proper OO without all that convoluted bless stuff

Moose[1], and more lightweight versions in Mouse[2] and Moo[3], have been around for ages by this point, almost 15 years in some cases. Unfortunately it was never made core (but something like them is supposed to be core in Perl 7), so it was always one of the "best practices" things that you had to be in contact with other people about Perl to know or read some Perl community stuff for, as it wasn't in the official docs.

> good data-science libs like pandas

To my knowledge Perl with PDL[4] was the go-to solution for bioinformatics people for a long time. I never did anything with it or Python's Pandas though, so I don't know how they compare (or more importantly, how they compared back when people actually used Perl for this stuff much).

> easy concurrency

While somewhat wonky, Perl's concurrency has been around in forms for a long time (the Coro[5] library was first released in 2001), if a bit harder to use until recently when like every other language the async/await stuff took over.

The parallelism story has always been pretty good, even if also slightly weird (the ithreads system used forks on Unix to emulate threads, but essentially it's an abstraction you can mostly ignore). Notably, the fact you actually had a threading system[6] with locks and semaphores that worked put it above Python and Ruby in that category.

> ergonomical web-frameworks to beat PHP

This took longer, but Mojolicious[7] seems to fit this category well, easily being used as simple as something like Sinatra to stuff close to Rails (IMO, and without ActiveRecord).

That's not to say Perl is perfect and should have always won out, just that I think the problems Perl experienced (and still experiences, and which recently "Perl 7" is trying to address) are more along the lines of the trade off that was made with regard to backwards compatibility and legacy support, and the effect that had long term on the community.

Perl's absolute adherence to backwards compatibility to the point that 20 year old scripts often run without issue on the latest release of the interpreter was always a boon to those that wanted stability and support. It's still used in some places (for example, where I work) as the primary scripting language for server based utilities that are expected to run in a Unix environment. The problem is that this is a trade-off that hurts more for new users and new technologies as time advances. It's great that our (literally) 20 year old scripts to clean up and do server management still function, but it's not as great that ergonomically Perl requirement to opt-in to many new features (so they don't cause old code with conflicting sub names to fail, as an example) means that there's been an ever increasing list of things you must enable in new Perl lest you deal with annoying old behavior makes it's use for new projects annoying at best. Having a good object system is only the first step, and you're right to call it out because as it was never moved to core, it never got as much use as it could have.

> Sadly it was not to be.

It is sad, because it's a nice language and I love using it most of the time, but I also feel like it wasted well over a decade of what should have been major advances because it was deemed less important than backwards compat and everybody just said "well there's a module for it, that's good enough" when it definitely wasn't sufficient. For chrissakes, Perl only got the most simplistic form of function signatures relatively recently, and what we got is far inferior to what was available and I used as a module a decade ago[8]. Perl's problems were always much deeper than not having some solution or equivalent to some nice tool or way of doing things in other languages. Those came, usually fairly quickly, it was all the other stuff that shed the users to the point that now it's hard to know if there's enough left to drive the change that's needed to keep it alive (in the sense that it's not just in bug maintenance mode).

Sorry for the rant. Obviously I'm sad about the current state of things... I've even mostly decided that I might as well do new projects in other languages, but it makes me sad that it feels like I'm doing so not because they're mostly superior at a level that's hard to compete with but because the Perl community (and this includes myself) couldn't get their shit together long enough to steal the good bits in a way that actually mattered to people looking to try a new language.

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moose_(Perl)#Examples

2: https://metacpan.org/pod/Mouse#SYNOPSIS

3: https://metacpan.org/pod/Moo#SYNOPSIS

4: http://pdl.perl.org/

5: https://metacpan.org/pod/Coro#SYNOPSIS

6: https://metacpan.org/pod/threads::shared

7: https://mojolicious.org/

8: Function::Parameters, as in the bottom of this comment https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11633961, as the CPAN page does a crap job of showing it with types which is my favorite part.

>> proper OO without all that convoluted bless stuff > >Moose[1], and more lightweight versions in Mouse[2] and Moo[3]

I found all those frameworks, and hacking with inside-out objects to be too cumbersome and got in the way, so I just went back to blessed hashes. I liked to keep things simple.

> easy concurrency

I never got into Coro, but AnyEvent was wonderful to work with, and shaped my thinking in other languages... though you could get away with much more in Perl.

> ergonomical web-frameworks to beat PHP

I don't know how anything could be more ergonomic than Dancer (Perl's Sinatra equivalent).

> but I also feel like it wasted well over a decade of what should have been major advances

This, but thinking back at the time, I think what killed Perl was Google choosing Python. At the time, CPAN was the killer app and still had the lead vs all other higher-level languages. But then Google chose Perl instead of Python and as it was the hottest startup at the time where everyone wanted to work at, people started learning Python. Then the data scientists (except the geneticists) migrated over and NumPy, Pandas (and now TensorFlow) kept the momentum.

> I don't know how anything could be more ergonomic than Dancer (Perl's Sinatra equivalent).

My understanding it that they're very equivalent in many respects, and popped up at about the same time. Often they're mentioned together as modern options, I didn't for brevity and I'm familiar with Mojo. I think Mojolivious tries to require only core modules with optional upgrade to non-core versions if supplied. Not sure how that compares with Dancer, been a long time since I looked at it.

> I think what killed Perl was Google choosing Python.

Possibly. I saw that as the natural extension of "python is the new teaching language" stuff that started happening in colleges at around the same time, and I think that had a lot to do with it as well. I'm the end it's all about users, and new users, as old users have a natural attrition through finding other things that interest them (whether a new language or non programming pursuits) or retirement or even death. Without new users eventually the community starves. And even if you get enough new users to replace the old ones, without enough new to keep a relevant position relative to all new users, the language will be relegated to a slow decay. That is, even if perl had enough new users to replace old ones, the total programmers grew manifold over the last decades, and without a slice of that pie you're stuck as a has-been language, and eventually people leave due to the natural pull of popular and vibrant language communities.

Fun fact: The Register's sites and CMS is still written in Perl, and still kicking ;)

Let's face it. At least it wasn't the sendmail config file.

I once worked on a two million line Perl app that provided forums and image sharing for feature phones. Remember when flip phones had a browser that defaulted to a forum of sorts? That.

I used perl years ago for all sorts of text processing and glue. I remember struggling with lists of lists. I just checked the docs[1] again to see if I've grown at all as an engineer in the last 15 years.

>Now you should be very careful that the outer bracket type is a round one, that is, a parenthesis. That's because you're assigning to an @array, so you need parentheses. If you wanted there not to be an @AoA, but rather just a reference to it, you could do something more like...

Still pretty tricky!

[1] https://perldoc.perl.org/perllol#NAME

The dreaded words, "your job is to write a CMS"

I’m sorry the code you produced made you so unhappy

EDIT: verb tense changed

Don't take attacks on a tool you like as an attack on you.

This is rarely ever the intention, and I'm 100% certain wasn't the intention of the poster here.

The tools you use shouldn't be your identity. Chill.

Can we get a bot that automatically posts what you just said in every thread about k8s and Rust?

One person’s tool is another person’s livelihood, the corner stone of their professional experience, and the basis by which other people will (apparently) judge their technical expertise

The comment that upset you made a joke about their code and the tools from the late 90s. It seems you took it as a personal insult as if they were directly talking to you or about your code. It is a really odd thing over which you to get defensive. I have no horse in this race and I would never judge anyone’s expertise solely on the tools they use (given that it might not even be their choice). But between the two of you one made a very dry joke and the other got defensive for no reason when the conversation wasn’t about them.

The tools we use don’t define us. If you feel they do, please reevaluate. Perl (C, k8s, PHP, Python 2.x) are just tools. It’s like defining your identity by the brand of hammer you use.

>The tools we use don’t define us. If you feel they do, please reevaluate. Perl (C, k8s, PHP, Python 2.x) are just tools. It’s like defining your identity by the brand of hammer you use.

Maybe they shouldn't but professionally they actually do. Try to get a job using a tool you love but doesn't have widespread adoption and it's hard. X years experience using tool Y? Better have got on board earlier. Adopt something early that really takes off while you write key libraries, docs, contribute (previous times o'reilly howto books) and it can make your career.

As a class we get awfully groupthink and boosterist of our tech choices. It's not good but it's completely understandable.

Hammers are completely fungible. Two similar languages used in similar places are not. See Perl and Python. Do you really have no preference seeing jobs that specify one or the other? If so that's great - I try to be thereabouts myself too. But it's clearly not the norm and it's not as irrational as you're making out here for all I dislike it.

edit: Trying to phrase this in a pithy fashion below.

It makes zero difference to you as a carpenter if every other carpenter on earth hates your chosen brand of hammer.

It makes a world of difference to you as a programmer if your language of choice is popular or not.

I have been on both sides of hiring decisions a lot. Here's what I can tell you: a developer who has a shit load of Perl experience will be more likely to get a job at a Python shop if they show flexibility in their choices. A Python developer who bashes Perl for being a shitty terrible language will not simply because having a bad attitude is a red flag.

If you have only worked with PHP 4 for the past 20 years and have no plans to move off that language then yeah you will have a harder time. But getting defensive about it in an online discussion is a weird thing to do and honestly a red flag more than anything. The tools may define you as a professional (to some), but not as a person. Getting defensive is a personal thing. If you do it as a professional that's pretty bad. If you take professional discussions personally, in my experience you'll be very difficult as a coworker.

Exactly. I feel your pain.

I write software for Apple systems. It’s modern, high-quality code, but it’s for Apple.

There are people that have never met me, and have never had any prior interactions with me, that hate (and that’s not hyperbole) me; simply because of that one fact.

I’m constantly reading stuff about Apple, and people that use/like/support/develop for Apple, that is intentionally insulting and demeaning.

I should know better, and wish you nothing but the best. Perl is a language easy to learn, and difficult to master.

You have my sincere respect.

> I write software for Apple systems. It’s modern, high-quality code, but it’s for Apple.

There are people that have never met me, and have never had any prior interactions with me, that hate (and that’s not hyperbole) me; simply because of that one fact.

I'm fascinated to hear this. I quite dislike Apple quite a bit as a company/entity, for a variety of pragmatic and philosophical reasons, but the idea that that would extend to their employees (let alone those working on their platform) is wild to me.

Shouldn't be. It's fairly classic human nature.

There's lots of folks with axes to grind, that are excellent spinners, and lots of people that are maybe...a bit insecure, shall we say, that eat that spin, and turn it into venom.

The old "Ford vs. Chevy" spat can get like that. People kill each other over which football teams they like.

It's easy to see why folks don't like Apple; just as it's easy to see why folks don't like every other platform.

It's just that there's a lot of really unbalanced folks out there, and even more folks who like to set those people off.

Deeply evolved back from when splitting into group A and group B could be followed by war breaking out and one lot killing the other. Thankfully these days it's more flamewars than sticks and stones.

Chris, we’re good. As others have pointed out, sometimes an edgy joke gets an edgy response.

This is what is considered edgy nowadays?

A generous interpretation would be that the OP meant "edgy" as in definition 2a from Webster's[1]:

being on edge : tense, irritable

In other words-- GP recounted a memory of tense, anxious feelings about working with Perl.

OP was unwittingly made edgy by reading this and anthropomorphized Perl to express said feelings of tension and anxiety back to GP.

Seems plausible to me.

[1] https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/edgy

Honest question. When did:

use strict;

Become more commonplace usage?

It started around two decades ago, but I would say the "use strict if at all possible or you're doing it wrong" consensus was reached at least as long ago as 2005, being conservative. Because backwards compatibility was always seen as paramount, it never became default, but if you opted into new version features by version number[1], those advanced to enabled both new features and to turn off or warn on use of what were considered problematic features in the code. For example, a "use v5.10;" pragma would warn indirect method syntax with the assumption you never wanted that (so any new Foo("arg"); would error, so people would use Foo->new("arg"); as the sane agreed upon way it should be done), and would disable bareword filehandles (so you would need to assign them to a scalar like $FH instead of FH).

use v5.12 and later also automatically enabled strict. Perl 5.10 was released in late 2007, and 5.12 in 2010, so there was enough consensus over a decade ago to add it as the default for anyone opting into the bundle of all newer Perl features.

1: https://perldoc.perl.org/feature#FEATURE-BUNDLES

Thanks for that answer, very interesting to know as someone who feels like they got into perl pretty late in the game. I do appreciate it where it works for sure.

I could definitely picture programming in perl in the 90s before people commonly implemented use strict; being a complete hellscape though

Yes, and it was exacerbated by mod_perl in Apache basically working by taking a Perl script/CGI and using eval to turn it into a sub, meaning any subs defined in that script (and not a module it included) to accidentally create closures easily, which really played havoc, and so people adopted... interesting workarounds[1], all in the name of performance.

1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11670454

I've been using it as long as I can remember.

I'm a -wall kinda guy.

> the basis by which other people will (apparently) judge their technical expertise

You lost me here. Even if someone thinks that Perl is an unholy abomination to work with, it doesn't follow that those with expertise in it are less skilled. If anything, it seems like it implies the opposite: expertise in it is harder. The counterpart would be something like claiming that Python is a toy language, simple to use but not suitable for Real Work. This claim is the exact opposite as the Perl complaint, and it seems like _that_ would imply negative things about expertise in the language.

I cut my teeth on stuff that would have a lot of folks 'round these parts, crouching under their Uplifts, clutching their teddy-bears, peeing their pants, sucking their thumbs, and sobbing. I started off doing Machine Code and embedded stuff, back when that was still fairly new.

I am very happy to use a nice, safe, memory-avoiding, strongly-typed language like Swift as my principal language, and on a GUI system.

I don't particularly care whether or not some rando on teh Internets tubes thinks I'm a "wuss."

It’s important to diversify.

Was this edited? I don’t see why anyone is reading this comment as rude or offensive … Seems fine.

He’s basically ribbing GP by purposefully misinterpreting the comment, so that what gave GP nightmares was his CMS rather than Perl itself.

Yes, sorry, I edited it to change it from present tense to past tense, as that was more in line with my meaning

Any particular reason for the insult? I don't recall saying anything bad to you.

Just a wild guess, but perhaps they read your hyperbole literally?

I doubt it. I looked them up (because I care about people, and don't actually want to hurt them), and it seems that Perl is a big part of their repertoire. Perl means a lot to them, and my flippant comment was probably taken as "calling their baby ugly."

So, @peteretep, you have my sincere apology. It was a flippant remark. At the time I wrote it (mid-1990s), Perl was the best way to write portable CGI code. I took the time to learn it, and got fairly good at it.

Since then, I have found my muse in other languages, but I sincerely did not want to give offense. I doubt that deleting the comment would help.

You said you wrote some code, and the memory of it makes you still wake up screaming. What’s the alleged insult, exactly?

The deliberate misinterpretation is just a style of humor.

Why do people post nasty things like this?

Some of us are veterans of the time when Perl was evangelized as the cure for everything, and the only way to sensibly think about unix programming. That led to the usual over-reaction from Perl critics and it became usual to make sharper comments about it even when you'd never used Perl.

Which all goes to show people clot up into tribes over any silly thing; and that its better not to wrap your identity too much around your tools.

Why does it feel like HN has become so incredibly sensitive? I have been reading comments here a while (13 years I think), and noticed that in the past couple of years is when critical of any piece of software, no matter how warranted or how tongue in cheek, results in comments like this. How would you have phrased the original sentiment that you wouldn’t think was nasty?

Like someone else said, 'don't take attacks on a tool you like as an attack on you.' I think theirs is the overly-sensitive reply. Why get worked up because someone doesn't like software that you do like? Bizarre.

Are you interpreting chrisseaton's comment as being in response to the original comment denigrating Perl? It seems more like it's a response to the defensive comment from petereps

yes. it is becoming terrible. everything might be an offense right now to SOMEONE... when have we become such chickens?

? What is nasty about that?

Almost certainly has been edited? Now I wonder what the original post was.

Nah. Wasn't edited, but it was definitely a slap at me, personally. I touched a nerve, and was reprimanded. It was not a "fun" response, and it made me realize that I had caused offense.

Teh Internets tubes are a difficult landscape to navigate. It's almost impossible to write stuff without causing some offense.

Some folks take that as an admonition to never write anything fun. Others (like me) learn to apologize.

I'm fairly good at apologizing, as I need to do it so often. Each time, I learn to ameliorate my approach.

But I'll never stop posting in a humorous way.

I don't see any need to apologise for what's clearly meant as a lighthearted joke. Just don't complain when someone comes up with a clever comeback :)

No, it wasn't lighthearted, but it wasn't vitriol, either. I touched a nerve, and got slapped.

It's cool.

Just for another perspective- I read it as peter intended, a deadpan way of purposefully taking your statement literally, that you wrote code that made you scream, it wasn't Perl's fault.

I found it hilarious, but I'm a weird guy. I just can see where he is coming from where he meant it as a snide joke, not a personal attack.

Looked like a good-natured but wry joke, not a slap.

This whole thread feels like a glorious exercise of Poe's Law.

I can't tell what's what, but man is it funny, to me it reads as deadpan humor by peterep with no insult intended, but obviously others read it differently.

Perspective is amazing and this has made my day from all the smiles and laughs XD

Yeah, it's weird. Even aside from different perspectives, we still get to choose how to interpret and react. "Don't take it personally" is a good way to go through life, in general.

you really make life way too hard for yourself? why the heck would u care if random stranger is offended over a simple joke regarding a programming language? waste of energy man

> why the heck would u care if random stranger is offended over a simple joke regarding a programming language?

Ooh. I know this one!

Because they are human, and humans are important.

I care, though that won’t always stop me from writing stuff that may or may not cause offense.

But I care about others. I know that makes me apostate, in today’s rage-fueled insane asylum of society, but that’s how I roll.

i think you could use your energy better. if people are offended because of bullshit, its their fault. not yours

Some people are not well socialised and just like to insult programming languages, and by extension, judge and put down their users. We should extend pity to them. Or perhaps detached bemusement as in https://youtu.be/R00JE6QRbno?t=8546

This made me laugh more than it should have.

It's 2021, stop writing legacy code that others will have to maintain.

Code is never legacy at the time of writing. That's... Not what legacy means.

Yes it is. If you write a COBOL program you're writing legacy code. Contrary to what you might think about Perl it's quickly approaching the same fate.

Perl scripts look like piles of vomit to me

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