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Comment by rjh29 | Hacker News Reader

Same as Perl, nobody wants to maintain it, but it's extremely fun to write. It has a lot of expression.

You can see that in Raku's ability to define keyword arguments with a shorthand (e.g. :global(:$g)' as well as assuming a value of 'True', so you can just call match(/foo/, :g) to get a global regex match). Perl has tons of this stuff too, all aimed at making the language quicker and more fun to write, but less readable for beginners.

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Many of the features that make Perl harder to write cleanly have been improved in Raku.

Frankly I would absolutely love to maintain a Raku codebase.

I would also like to update a Perl codebase into being more maintainable. I'm not sure how much I would like to actually maintain a Perl codebase because I have been spoiled by Raku. So I also wouldn't like to maintain one in Java, Python, C/C++, D, Rust, Go, etc.

Imagine learning how to use both of your arms as if they were your dominant arm, and doing so simultaneously. Then imagine going back to only using one arm for most tasks. That's about how I feel about using languages other than Raku.

its not that reading perl is hard, the _intent_ of the operations of often hard/unclear.

Yes its nice to write dense fancy code, however, something very boring to write like PHP is a lot of "loop over this bucket and do something with the fish in the bucket, afterwards, take the bucket and throw it into the bucket pile" that mirrors a 'human follows these steps' type.

Frankly I'm on Team Fish Bucket.

I am not totally convinced--well, not at all convinced, really-- that the OOP revolution made programming code better, simpler, easier to follow, than procedural code.

I suppose the argument ended up being a philosophical discussion about where State was held in a running program (hard to tell in procedural code, perhaps, and easier to tell in OOP), but after 20+ years of Java I wonder if baby hadnt disappeared down the plughole with the bathwater.

In the intent department, I have had more troubles with AbstractClassFactorySingletonDispatcher type Java code, add to that dependency injection magic/madness.

I'd rather maintain Perl any day than 30 classes of Java code just to build a string.

I’d rather have a compiler+ide-supported testing framework that doesn’t require a tested code to be prepared for being tested in any way. Almost all boring languages are fine at writing straightforward code without ceremony, even Java.

I once heard of a merger between a company that used Java, and another one that used Perl.

After that merger, both teams were required to make a similar change.

If I remember right, the Perl team was done before the Java team finished the design phase. Or something like that.

The best aspect of Java is that it is difficult to write extremely terrible code. The worst aspect is that it is difficult to write extremely awesome code. (If not impossible.)

If this was about my former $work:

The company using Perl was able to double its turnover in 3 weeks.

The company using Java was still in the design phase.

Companies choose their tools depending on their internal culture. The company using Perl at the time was simply more agile.

FWIW, the company that was using Perl is now using Java mostly. And yes, the culture of the company has changed. Not sure about cause and effect.

The thing is you can chose to write perl in a way that doesn't suck. The problem with TMTOWTDI is that with 18 people in a code base.... well its best to have a set of conventions when writing perl. Let's all agree to use 5.x.x with these features for example

These days you can TMTOWTDI in Python as well though.

The TMTOWTDI argument was valid in very early stages of Perl vs Python debate, like some what between 2000 - 2006 etc.

These days Python is just Perl with mandatory tab indentation. Python is no longer that small language, with small set of syntactical features. C++/Java etc in the meanwhile have gotten even more TMTOWTDI heavy over the years.

I don't really work with python often enough but as for php there's usually one boring way to do it. We eschew generally more fun stuff like array operations because for loops work and the intent is vlear

Good job those aren't the only two options!

Perl reminds me of that job I had writing ANSI MUMPS.

it's extremely fun to write

Then your contrarian phase ends and you regret that you didn’t learn something useful in that time.

Things do not require to be useful or to increase revenue in order for them to be enjoyable. If the only reason you ever do something is because you get material wealth out of it, are you even making choices or are you a perfect rational actor as described in textbooks?

Things are allowed to exist and be enjoyed on the sole basis that they are enjoyable

Oh I’m not wealth motivated at all. My regrets are about uselessness of that time itself. E.g. I could learn ML instead and do nothing useful with it, rather than not doing nothing useful with my perl knowledge today.

the irony

This is so self-contradicting, it feels like division by zero

I could enjoy one knowledge today without having monetary interest in it ever, but instead I have another knowledge which is completely useless even for enjoyment.

I was paid to write it, but still find it useful for short scripts and one liners. I'd use it over sed, awk or shell without pause.

It is very strong for text processing, particularly regexes.

Finally learning any language helps you learn new paradigms which you can apply anywhere. Same as Haskell or Lisp or something.

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