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Comment by ChrisMarshallNY | Hacker News Reader

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.

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> 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.

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