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Comment by larodi | Hacker News Reader

We were indeed, and sadly like many true wizards - we were grumpy and too smart and too weird for the world. And we had too many sigyls and weird symbols and we didn’t see farther than our nose, so we weren’t that good with foretelling things, but only with practical magic.

Even though wizards foretold nPm by inventing CJAN - like Cpan for JavaScript. And also IO::Async and Lehman’s work was very much ahead of NodeJS.

But we were not brave enough to transpire to JS neither .Net, nor JRE so others figured out how to do it better before us… even though we tried.

Finally like all proud wizards we eventually split the magic school in two faculties and went in ever deeper obscurity and magic.

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POE (2001!) was another async-ahead-of-its-time:

https://www.perl.com/pub/2001/01/poe.html/

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perl_Object_Environment

the perl community has a way to create cute abstraction that still makes sense ..

> We were indeed, and sadly like many true wizards - we were grumpy and too smart and too weird for the world.

The submitted post exemplifies the worst characteristics of what we can call coding culture. Larry Wall was a polarising character. He could be witty but also tiresome.

The C and C++ coding cultures have had their problems too.

Python has been successful as a language and as a coding culture. I don't like the bigotry of the Python community towards other languages, but the openness and focus on coding ergonomics has been different from most (all?) other prominent languages.

It can't hurt to have a couple of MAANA (was FAANG) giants providing material support.

> And we had too many sigyls and weird symbols

This I think is an unfair criticism frequently aimed at Perl by people who haven't reached fluentness. The language is expressive. To attain higher complexity, languages will adopt new symbols and forms. Anyone who knows Python and uses DSLs such as pandas and numpy knows that "sigils and weird symbols" make their appearances in the mutant notation.

Python has its own TIMTOWDI at this point.

> Larry Wall was a polarising character. He could be witty but also tiresome.

To whom? Unless you were working on the Perl language itself, there was no need to interact with him.

I offered to help out with the Perl 6 logo, as I had both experience writing Perl as a career and having gone to art and design school - while also running a printing studio of my own.

I joined the Perl6 dev mailing lists, listened in on them, offered my support, gave a broad stroke on design ideas, backed them up with reasonable arguments and asked for comments. Larry chimed in basically saying, "no, because this sucks" and not too long later the Camelia butterfly[0] thing was born.

So yeah, I bounced.

Larry may be brilliant, but maybe he also has a history of not knowing when to delegate tasks (and trust). And now Perl WAS something, rather than IS something.

[0] https://raku.org/camelia-logo.png

That cheap logo did serious brand damage...

"Perl 6" in a monotype typeface would have been worlds better.

An elegant logo having "Camellia" is straightforward to design. They could even have some fun, use the fact that Camellia is the Tea plant and lampoon Java (with a flower floating on a cup for example, Japanese style). That would had sent the correct message of "we are back, unafraid to comparisons, and want our throne returned". And would be perfectly inclusive for both men and women.

We all ask the children to name the pets. Is cute, but often we live to regret it. With logos is the same.

I love it - these are really good, fun ideas.

Can you provide a link to this conversation? I'd love to hear your input or see what you proposed.

To clarify, I am OK if Larry shot down a design idea on Perl 6 itself, but there WAS a RFC of design ideas, which I did not contribute because honestly, I am not qualified to design a language.

I am qualified to help design a logo. And if the feedback was, "great ideas, but not the direction I want to go. What about..." or anything similar, that would be a fine way to show that my offer for doing free work is still happily welcome, with reasonable direction from the owner of the project. You know like a discussion.

There's some great OS logos. The Linux Penguin was great. BSD Daemon, etc, etc, etc. I love the camel, but that's not owned by Perl. It's not an impossible task.

>> Python has its own TIMTOWDI at this point.

It's Python's dependency management, and there is more than one way to do it:

pip, pipenv, poetry, conda, setuptools, hatch, micropipenv, PDM, pip-tools, egg, ActiveState platform, homebrew, or your operating system's package manager.

Relevant xkcd: https://xkcd.com/1987/

python packaging is nearing "there's no way to do it right"

"Larry Wall was a polarising character. He could be witty but also tiresome."

Yes. This. Thank you for calling this out.

But I feel like Python is too complex and big to really like now. It was my go-to language in the 2000s as a kind of sweet spot: featureful/library-rich enough for getting things done, but not overgrown with decades of individually-worthwhile complications.

(Not saying it was ever my paradigm for elegant language design or that it's their job to conform to my taste.)

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