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Comment by peatmoss | Hacker News Reader

I think it upset the Perl hegemony in part because of the enterprise infatuation with object orientation. Perl got a lot of flak from the Java/XML crowd (“Perl’s not a real language—it’s not object oriented!”).

You could kind of write Java in Python, and thus a certain kind of enterprise techie couldn’t dismiss Python as “just” a scripting language.

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In my experience, Perl got a lot of flak for being "write only", I don't really remember anybody complaining it wasn't "object oriented".

Every Perl code base I've seen, or inherited, has been a mess. My favourite was a bunch of utilities all written by the same person who never did anything the same way twice. Each utility was like an entry in an obfuscated 'C' contest.

I used Perl to build my first web application at LONG time ago. That project is included in the list of Perl code bases I've seen that were a mess :-)

There was definitely a group of people who thought "object oriented" was the One True Way and any languages that don't support it are "toys." I'm not sure I ever heard their ire directed at Perl specifically, but I recall the sentiment existing.

Oh definitely the attitude exists. I just never saw it directed at Perl. Maybe since, in my experience, Perl has mostly be used as a system language and not a application development language.

How the pendulum has swung!

Rust doesn't even sport 'Class'

And of cause the fact that the Perl community relished in inventing new and exiting shorthand tricks that allowed perl script to be essentially write only unless you stuck to an style-guide that had not been codified.

Perl like VisualBasic had a well deserved reputation for facilitating atrocious hard to debug code, and it was this reputation more then the lack of OO/XML support that led both of those to fade back into the realm of forgotten memory and business critical enterprise applications that nobody dares to touch.

The word "enterprise" kind of reminded me of one possible significant reason for python's huge adoption rate after the second part of the 2000s. Google started using it for a lot of things at some point and was advertising a ton of python jobs. That was both a shining endorsement and a possible way into the company.

I actually think Google picked the winner by deciding to use Python, especially for TensorFlow, right at the time when deep learning really started taking off, and also at a time when they were seen as the leader in engineering best practices that other companies wanted to emulate.

Google followed the writing on the wall, nothing else.

Google was known as one of the most academic engineering companies, in the 00-ies.

That would be similar to saying C isn't a real language while ignoring the existence of C++. Perl 4 wasn't OO, but Perl 5 enthusiastically embraced OO. The first release of Perl 5 was in 1994, whereas Java 1.0 was 1996.

It did take a while for the wider Perl community to embrace OO, though. There were a lot of Perl programmers who weren't into lofty paradigms. Plenty of Perl programmers weren't fully sold on the idea of breaking your program into functions.

I (rather to the displeasure of many people) refer to that kind of OOP Python as "Java fanfic"...

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