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Comment by kemayo | Hacker News Reader

It's hardly "inexplicable"... particularly if you're comparing it to Perl, a famously hard to read language.

* Python has clean and readable syntax that a complete beginner can understand -- it's really close to the pseudocode you might use for teaching.

* Python has a good standard library, so you can do a lot before you need to work out how to install more (and, reproducibility concerns aside, `pip install` is really simple once you get there)

* Because it was easy to pick up and easy to use for teaching, it took over some niches like stats in academia / data-analysis, where the people doing the work aren't professional programmers but just need something they can hack together. Once NumPy existed, people had minimal incentive to move away.

(Insert Marge Simpson "I just think it's neat" gif here.)

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> a famously hard to read language.

That's putting it lightly. Many jokes were made at Perl's expense on that topic, but

    $\=$/;for(@ARGV){open F,$_;while(<F>){print if/$_/}}

is a valid Perl program to grep for lines that are the file's name. One of the jokes was that it was a write only language and it was only half way a joke. Coming back to a pile of magic variables months later with no comments, omfg. Meanwhile, Python sometimes scarcely even needs commenting if it's a short script if the writer uses descriptive function and variable names.

Perl's downfall, was that coming back to a ball of Perl mud after say 3 years and have to fix a bug, due to lack of classes and Perl 6 being delayed forever, you were in for not lot of fun. Python isn't perfect and that's why it's grown types, but Perl was seriously write only at times.

Every programmer worth their salt must learn to use power tools, and also train to work beyond the beginner-intermediate levels, that has now become the permanent situation in our line of work.

Nobody should be spending a day writing Python to do work that can be done using a vim macro in like 5 mins. Or spend a year doing in Python what can be done in a week in Perl.

>> $\=$/;for(@ARGV){open F,$_;while(<F>){print if/$_/}}

There are lots Perl one-liner patterns, once you learn to write them. You are basically saving yourself writing many dozen man-hours of Python/Java coding work.

I remember telling my manager during the Perl days. A 10 year Java experience guy looks great, but thats basically a junior Perl dev with 6 months experience.

There is nothing to feel great about wasting effort and more importantly time.

I have used perl oneliners on and off for 20 years and because I don't need them every day I have to look up stuff every time.

Not sure your time-saving thing really works, especially if 99% of problems you have are not solved by a perl oneliner.

>>Not sure your time-saving thing really works, especially if 99% of problems you have are not solved by a perl oneliner.

That's because if you don't have a paradigm of thought, you are not likely to reach for a tool that works there.

Most of the times, I have seen Java programmers watch in total awe that their pet weekly project, that took 40+ hours to accomplish, was basically a vim macro that they could have done in like 3 - 5 mins.

That was my whole point I made, when I said, when a Java dev says they have like 10 years of experience, thats barely a Junior perl dev.

I'm guessing most Python/Java programmers would find it impossible to work in project which doesn't involve a database, XML, or json. Those languages are not designed to work with a data or a compute paradigm outside of these formats.

This might be the stupidest comment I've ever read on HN. There's not a single case where using Perl is the right call. As others have joked it's a "write only"language. The garbage you write in Perl is illegible to everyone else and will be illegible to yourself once you move on to the next project and have to come back and debug your old Perl in 18months+. You think you're being clever with your Perl one liners and mini scripts but you're actually sabotaging your team. My honest opinion is that anyone who knows this and still writes Perl needs to be fired because they're actively undermining the team and the organization with code that is essentially legacy technical debt the minute it's committed to the organization repos.

You use a real language for these projects because it allows someone besides yourself to collaborate and maintain the project

>>As others have joked it's a "write only"language.

The pet project you write to replace that Perl one liner is also write only once project. The only difference is you waste years of your life doing what we do in minutes.

There is nothing to boast about wasting your life doing things that don't even have to be done.

There is nothing to feel great about wasting effort and more importantly time.

Which is why the tasks you're talking about are being delegated to LLMs that don't GAF what the target language is.

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