[HN Gopher] Perl, the first postmodern computer language (1999)
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Perl, the first postmodern computer language (1999)
Author : takiwatanga
Score : 136 points
Date : 2022-05-04 12:05 UTC (10 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.wall.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.wall.org)
| dc-programmer wrote:
| Meta-modernism was a mistake
| 40acres wrote:
| The first code base I worked on professionally was Perl. While I
| admire it's power I never got used to it. It was very difficult
| for me to read and our code base was pretty large and I didn't
| feel like Perl handled OOP well at all. When we switched to
| Python it was like a breath of fresh air.
| sigmonsays wrote:
| anyone remember scaling servers with POE?
|
| Ah the good ol days....
| kerblang wrote:
| For years Mr Wall attempted to justify Perl as the manifestation
| of 90's neohippie culture, as this mashup of weirdness that was
| cool because it didn't worry about being particularly consistent
| with itself. I think the worst of it is when he draws parallels
| with the Dave Matthews Band. Ugh. Nothing screams "I'm soooo
| dated" like fixating on short-lived youth trends. Perhaps he
| should've described Perl as "hip hop" but... hmmm...
| kerblang wrote:
| I take it there are a lot of rabid Dave Matthews fans on here.
| hzhou321 wrote:
| Perl is really cursed by the past glory. People still trying to
| revive Perl against modern fad, for example, Python. Fad are
| powered by steam of live Eco-systems, which Perl once had, but no
| longer have. There is no real reason why Perl couldn't succeed
| where Python does other than the path of history. And there is no
| real reason to chase history today.
|
| Rather than looking for killer app or adding modern features,
| such as the effort of Perl 6, now Raku, Perl should shed features
| and focus on stability (which it is fighting hard to retain), on
| ubiquity (which it had and are losing ground), and core
| performance (which it is slowly degrading due to features). I
| think it should try to get a core set into POSIX standard. The
| core Perl can be like POSIX shell, while a distribution always
| can distribute a fancier, but always compatible Perl.
|
| Perl should replace shell scripting, period. If there is any
| reason shell scripts is still preferred, then that should be the
| TOP focus for Perl steering council to address.
|
| It really frustrates me to see people today, me included, are
| still trying to manage basic software engineering in shell
| scripts. It really amuses me today to listen to pastors on how to
| write good shell scripts. It really saddens me today to watch
| efforts of inventing a better shell for scripting.
| andai wrote:
| >Whatever the verb you choose, I've done it over the course of
| the years from C, sh, csh, grep, sed, awk, Fortran, COBOL, PL/I,
| BASIC-PLUS, SNOBOL, Lisp, Ada, C++, and Python. To name a few. To
| the extent that Perl rules rather than sucks, it's because the
| various features of these languages ruled rather than sucked.
|
| "I have stolen ideas from every book I have ever read. My
| principle in researching a novel is 'Read like a butterfly, write
| like a bee', and if this story contains any honey, it is entirely
| because of the quality of the nectar I found in the work of
| better writers."
|
| Philip Pullman
| catchclose8919 wrote:
| ...to this day, I still can't wrap my head on _how PHP even got
| to exist_ in a world where Perl was already filling the web niche
| just fine.
|
| Also, if they wouldn't have made it too-weird-for-math-and-
| physics people, Perl would've probably filled Python's niche too.
|
| And with that kind of resources focused on it, Perl 6 could've
| actually turned up into a clean nice new language that would've
| unified us all by also supporting nice compile-to-wasm.
|
| </alternative-reality>
| mekster wrote:
| Everyone was just starting out at pre 2000. Perl was scripting
| first but PHP was HTML first, as in plain HTML is still a valid
| PHP and it was easy for people to pick up without having have
| to see some weird error without the content-type "magic" line
| and setting the file to "777" to get it working.
|
| But I do like its Unix feeling. Too bad no one uses it anymore
| and have to move on.
| tombert wrote:
| I'm speaking completely out of my ass here, but my suspicion
| for why PHP took over the web is largely because it was "web-
| first". It was free, open source, and you wrote directly on
| HTML pages, instead of Perl spitting out HTML via CGI.
|
| I think ColdFusion was briefly popular for the same reason
| (though I think that one fell out of favor largely because it
| cost a ton of money).
| Arathorn wrote:
| It's easy; PHP is/was: <html><body> <?php
| echo 'Hello World'; ?> </body></html>
|
| Whilst the equivalent Perl at the time would be:
| #!/usr/local/bin/perl print "Content-Type:
| text/html\r\n\r\n"; print "<html><body>"; print
| "Hello world"; print "</body></html>";
|
| or possibly... #!/usr/local/bin/perl use
| strict; use warnings; use CGI; my $q =
| CGI->new; print $q->header('text/html'); print
| $q->start_html(); print "Hello world"; print
| $q->end_html();
|
| ...if you were being a bit more more fancy.
|
| In other words, there was no standard templating; Template
| Toolkit eventually became a relatively defacto standard, but
| PHP had already won - and even then, TT had to be manually
| invoked rather than just going and freestyling <?php> tags
| everywhere in your HTML and "it just working".
|
| In every other respect Perl is & was superior to PHP, and it's
| really sad to see Perl fade, despite (or because of?) its crazy
| flexibility and power.
| ff317 wrote:
| +1 to that. I'll add the other thing that gave PHP an edge at
| the time:
|
| Installing any major work built in Perl back then was a
| nightmare of installing all the underlying dependency
| modules, often into the system directories. It didn't have a
| clean, standardized way to package up a script + dependencies
| easily, and dependency management was hellish, especially
| with many key modules needing platform-specific C
| compilation.
|
| At that time commercial "shared" hosting was still common:
| many customers sharing one linux webhosting box and uploading
| scripts to via FTP, with no access to or control over the
| underlying system. If the webhost supported PHP, you could
| upload a php script and it Just Worked. Not so with Perl!
|
| Perl was by far the superior language, but it just wasn't the
| superior experience for a beginning web developer who mostly
| just wanted to embed a tiny amount of CGI functionality in a
| static HTML page, and then upload and run it pretty much
| anywhere with no fuss.
| anthk wrote:
| No CPAN and local::lib?
| hedora wrote:
| With your first example, there was no easy path to compatibly
| handling form requests. Web browsers really sucked back then.
|
| As I understand it, PHP became popular before CGI.pm was
| ready.
| thatwasunusual wrote:
| > As I understand it, PHP became popular before CGI.pm was
| ready.
|
| CGI.pm was created long (...) before PHP was released.
| thesuperbigfrog wrote:
| >> In other words, there was no standard templating.
|
| I am not sure how much of a standard it was, but Perl Mason
| was a superb web site templating system.
|
| Amazon and many other websites used it for years because it
| was flexible, high performance, and had fewer security
| problems compared to PHP.
|
| http://www.masonhq.com/sites
|
| https://masonbook.houseabsolute.com/book/
| thatwasunusual wrote:
| I was about to mention HTML::Mason, which was superior to
| many other templating solutions back then.
|
| The biggest problem for Perl was that PHP was almost built
| for the web, while Perl was "just a normal programming
| language."
|
| I wonder where Perl would have been if there had been a
| packaged and easy to install version of Apache with Perl,
| mod_perl, HTML::Mason etc. pre-installed in some way in
| late 90s.
| tomc1985 wrote:
| Pretty sure there's a way to load perl as a webserver module
| like PHP, then you can do that embedded stuff too
| jerf wrote:
| Yes, but that stuff came later. It's actually the first way
| I used Perl on the web, but by then PHP was off to the
| races.
|
| You could even get modules that would allow you to inline
| Python just like PHP, although the interaction between that
| and mandatory indentation could get a bit "interesting".
|
| Also perhaps ironically, this style of mixing code and HTML
| has generally come to be regarded as an antipattern. PHP
| may still be able to do that, but woe unto the project that
| wants to write tons of code that way. But it's still the
| foothold PHP used to wedge its way into at least the B tier
| of languages.
| tomc1985 wrote:
| > Also perhaps ironically, this style of mixing code and
| HTML has generally come to be regarded as an antipattern.
|
| Tell that to the React world :P
| xorcist wrote:
| That was certainly part of the convenience out of the box.
| But you could have done something similar with mod_perl since
| it had filters that could act on every page. Then embperl
| started to gain popularity some time in 1996, which was
| decidedly even more like a templating engine, and after that
| came Mason.
|
| PHP really exploded in popularity when web hosting took off.
| It had a safe mode that made it possible to for several
| customers to co-exist in the same web server, without having
| the ability to read each other's files.
| incanus77 wrote:
| I'll tell you why it appealed to me.
|
| I started programming web systems in '96, with Perl because it
| was on every machine and every web host. Apache mod_perl was a
| thing, and it was a bad thing, because it had to be restarted
| all the time because of memory leaks.
|
| On the other hand, mod_php was much more solid, and
| additionally, at the time, MySQL was the main thing for many
| websites. The Perl database bindings were wordy and obtuse, but
| PHP was a breath of fresh air. I was able to start using it in
| environments in '99 and honestly, I've never looked back at
| Perl as a web application language, just a systems one.
|
| That simple difference was enough to make me fully switch over,
| and it set me on the path of a career programmer, so I look
| back on that time very fondly.
|
| One other thing: I don't recall Perl scripts allowing C-style
| pre-processing inclusion the way PHP did. I worked at Linux.com
| around then and we used all sorts of templating and other
| library reuse via this inclusion.
| dunefox wrote:
| If we're speaking alternative realities, I'd like to live in
| the one where Lisp took over instead of Java/C++...
| toast0 wrote:
| mod_perl was stateful and mod_php was stateless.
|
| By that I mean, a mod_perl program was expected to change the
| execution state for future executions, global variables would
| remain, etc. There are ways to make that happen in mod_php, but
| it isn't the default and I don't know if they were available
| initially. This made it easier to share a mod_php server with
| many users... A mod_perl really should be suexeced per user (or
| something) and that's hard. Really, you want to do per user php
| servers too, but it wasn't obvious back then.
| 0xbadcafebee wrote:
| People see a tool designed for one specific purpose, assume
| that must be the best tool for the job, adopt it, then more
| people do, then it gets popular, then people adopt it just
| because it's popular.
| influx wrote:
| As I recall, PHP just seemed blazing fast compared to Perl, and
| most web hosts already had it installed in Apache. Further,
| many web hosts didn't even allow CGI due to security issues.
| [deleted]
| MichaelMoser123 wrote:
| maybe perl code is a bit unreadable at times, but its
| documentation is very readable. Just look at:
|
| https://perldoc.perl.org/perlfunc#Perl-Functions-by-Category
|
| All the standard library ordered as links, by categories that
| actually make sense!
|
| Also perl5 used to be very accessible, even the parser error
| message made actual sense. I think that a lot of care has been
| put into these details, and that this attention to details did
| have a role in the success of the language.
| a4isms wrote:
| Modernism:
|
| "Less is more"--Mies van der Rohe
|
| Postmodernism:
|
| "Less is a bore"--Robert Venturi
|
| ----------
|
| Guided by these famous quotes, if I were to call a programming
| language a "Modernist" language, I'd think of something that
| prizes elegance. It can't just be a small language, it has to be
| a small language with a few features powerful enough to actually
| do more.
|
| I would think of languages like Scheme or Smalltalk or C as
| fitting that label. But not JavaScript or Java or C++.
|
| And if I were to call a language "Postmodernist," I'd expect a
| language to incorporate historical motifs, whimsey/surprise, and
| arresting/attention-grabbing features.
|
| Perl might fit that bill. C++ manages to be "more" without being
| postmodernist, IMO.
| a4isms wrote:
| I'm adding SNOBOL to my list of modernist languages.
| "Everything is pattern-matching" fits the modernist ethos.
|
| On the other hand, what about APL? Although the syntax looks
| just as much like line noise as Perl's syntax, it is actually a
| very elegant language. Is APL also a modernist language?
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a9xAKttWgP4
| anthk wrote:
| If you think about it... Smalltalk.
| a4isms wrote:
| p.s. This is fun. So what constitutes a _Brutalist_ programming
| language?
|
| It should be something that:
|
| - Exposes the construction materials
|
| - Implies mass and permanence
|
| - Is usually institutional, e.g. libraries, government
| buildings, public housing. Only rarely shopping centres or
| company head offices (which were usually done in the
| "International" style when Brutalism was a thing).
|
| What fits that bill? How about SQL?
| anthk wrote:
| Forth. It was in OpenBIOS, it exposes the internals, you can
| define all its standard words by itself.
| the_only_law wrote:
| COBOL, ABAP
| munificent wrote:
| C++ is absolutely the world's foremost brutalist language.
| anthk wrote:
| What? Not even close. C++ is Baroque.
| munificent wrote:
| None of its monumental complexity is ornamental. It's all
| there to expose some inner working of its underlying
| semantics for the user that needs to access it. It's hard
| for me to imagine something more brutalist than operator
| new or partial template specialization.
| a4isms wrote:
| There's always protected inheritance, a/k/a "was_a," or,
| "is implemented in terms of."
|
| That's like postmodern furniture design. "This couch
| was_a giant pair of lips," meaning that although it is
| implemented as a pair of lips, we'll treat it as type
| couch.
|
| Same for, "This chair was_a giant baseball glove."
| pram wrote:
| MUMPS
| lifefeed wrote:
| Ada.
| tokai wrote:
| The author misunderstood what postmodern is. It is not the next
| epoch after modernism.
| anthk wrote:
| Saying that to a linguist it's... interesting.
|
| On Perl, CPAN was and it's still amazing, and lots of stuff
| came from that. For example, Mojolicious for the web, BioPerl
| for bioinformatics and Rivescript to write silly chatbots,
| among others. Oh, and pkg_* under OpenBSD.
|
| INB4 gen-z's rant on "PeRl It'S UnRead@ble", check the intro
| from "perldoc perlintro".
|
| EDIT: Unless I'm sure the deleted link it's right, I'd avoid
| posting it.
| fps_doug wrote:
| I'm more than two decades away from being gen-z, and I still
| agree with that sentiment. There might be that theoretical
| wise and disciplined Perl programmer writing well structured
| and readable code, but wherever I interfaced with people
| writing/maintaining Perl code, it was the most hastily thrown
| together crap that once was a small tool that "just worked"
| and then slowly grew completely out of hands over the years.
| You can have that in any language, but for some reason Perl
| always excelled at that discipline.
|
| Also, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0jK0ytvjv-E
| cestith wrote:
| Be sure to blame the saw and the hammer, as it can't be the
| fault of the carpenter.
| chasd00 wrote:
| iirc Perl was always described as the "duct tape of the
| internet" which encompasses the good and bad sides of Perl.
| the_only_law wrote:
| > I'm more than two decades away from being gen-z, and I
| still agree with that sentiment.
|
| Can't really be a comment without a aside-from-the-point
| slurring
| [deleted]
| cestith wrote:
| Please don't post links to pirated content.
| anthk wrote:
| I think Orelly themselves put these for free back in the
| day in its own domain. I have to seek archive.org in order
| to be sure.
|
| I tought that because most of the books are outdated (15
| years on IT it's an epoch), albeit the sed/awk/perl/*sh and
| Sendmail books are still godly useful.
| cestith wrote:
| I actually received a free book from O'Reilly once for
| pointing out the exact site you mentioned, so their
| lawyers could address it.
|
| If you want these books very cheaply, the Perl CD
| Bookshelf usually sells for about $5 used. You get Perl
| in a Nutshell in print and a bunch of the other books on
| CD.
|
| A better introduction to Perl these days is Modern Perl,
| which is available to read online for free or you can pay
| for a print book. http://modernperlbooks.com/
| cestith wrote:
| https://www.wordnik.com/words/postmodern
|
| Postmodern in this instance means rejecting modernism by
| remixing eclectic elements from various periods.
| forgotmypw17 wrote:
| I love Perl. I use almost none of its more esoteric features, and
| just write "classic procedural" code, mostly using command-line
| utilities instead of third-party modules for anything I don't
| want to write myself (mainly cryptography), and I am so fucking
| happy not having to deal with breaking changes in my language, a
| rare quality these days.
|
| I used a machine with a 9-year-old distro on it for a few months,
| and all my scripts ran without issue, and I have high confidence
| that they will continue to run for years down the road without my
| having to adjust them for breaking changes in the language
| runtime, which is more than I can say for most other stacks I've
| used.
|
| Furthermore, ALL the code examples I can google up will work
| without me having to check if they're for the right version of
| Perl, because it has near-perfect backwards compatibility going
| back all the way to 5.000 from 1994.
|
| About the only other thing with a comparable level of stability
| has been HTML/JS/CSS, which gets a lot of new features all the
| time, but, for the most part, if I use only minimal features,
| remains usable for years without modification.
| richard_todd wrote:
| Yeah, I agree with you. For fun I built Perl 1 a couple years
| ago and was amazed at how similar it was to Perl 5. In fact
| most of the test suite from Perl 1 runs unmodified on Perl 5.
| The subroutine calling syntax was different (it used `do
| xxx();` I think) so those tests fail.
|
| But unfortunately, some Perl devs in recent years keep thinking
| that what they need to do is break stuff to "modernize". They
| keep eyeing goals like turning `strict` on by default, and
| eliminating lesser-used features, which will surely break
| untold numbers of 20-year-old scripts.
|
| I think there is some low-level anxiety among some of their
| developers that interest in their language has basically
| evaporated and they keep reaching for a silver bullet that
| doesn't exist. I think they are crazy ("perl 7... now 10% more
| like python!") but it's open-source so in the worst case I'm
| sure someone will keep a traditional perl from bit-rotting.
|
| edit: I had made a short blog post about playing with perl 1:
| https://rwtodd.org/2020/Jun/building-perl-1
| mfontani wrote:
| > They keep eyeing goals like turning `strict` on by default
|
| Not unless you declare a version. Old style perl will
| continue to work as before.
|
| If you declare something like: use v5.40;
|
| ... then, and only then, you'll get strict/warnings/whatever
| turned on.
|
| Your 20 year old script can continue to run just fine.
| richard_todd wrote:
| That doesn't really capture what's been happening. If
| feature bundles are still today's plan, it's only because
| the multiple attempts to get strict on by default have so
| far all been defeated. They are still pushing forward
| adding options to disable features like indirect calls,
| multidimensional hashes, bareword filehandles, etc. And you
| can bet that at some point they will revive the idea of
| moving to Perl7/8/9 and permanently remove those things as
| they go.
|
| Some--not all--of the people working on perl really want
| so-called "cruft" to disappear. I'm not a fan of that
| attitude for such an old language with such a rich history
| of backwards-compatibility, and I definitely don't think
| it's going to accomplish some kind of perl renaissance. I
| think it would be better to double down on what makes perl
| unique. When I watch Signes giving a talk like
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FlGpiS39NMY where he shakes
| his head at variables like `$;` or `$,` (29:20 in the
| video) ... it looks like the leaders of perl hate how
| strange it is. That worries people like me, who love perl
| _because_ of its quirkiness, not in spite of it. Surely
| people who want something more consistent have moved to
| Ruby long ago.
| mfontani wrote:
| > They are still pushing forward adding options to
| disable features like indirect calls, multidimensional
| hashes, bareword filehandles, etc.
|
| Personally, so long as all that stuff's behind a feature
| bundle I'm all in favour of it.
|
| A little nitpick: it's not about "multidimensional
| hashes", but rather "multidimensional array emulation".
| Steer clear of it, if you can.
|
| I personally don't mind using variables like $; or
| whatever. Some prefer to "use English" and use longer
| variables name for the same effect. More power to them.
|
| I just wrap the call with the proper "## no critic (...)"
| and off I go.
| taeric wrote:
| TeX has stability to compare. But, stability is seen as a goal
| for that project.
| petdance wrote:
| > I use almost none of its more esoteric features
|
| Which features do you see as esoteric?
| giraffe_lady wrote:
| I don't know if its backwards compatibility reaches into the
| 90s but I've been using ruby for this for like a decade now.
| Most envs that ship with anything ship with ruby and I've only
| very rarely run into version problems.
|
| I think people tend to associate it only with a certain era of
| web dev, but it has remained a good scripting language with a
| large, consistent, well-documented standard library for a long
| time now.
|
| Not worth switching off perl since you're very used to that,
| but iirc ruby was initially conceived as a successor to perl
| and for me at least it has landed in that role.
| jrumbut wrote:
| Ruby is a fantastic scripting language and I generally use it
| instead of Perl but for the ugliest corner cases, character
| encoding gotchas, *nix system oddities, etc I frequently find
| someone from the Perl community has had my problem and solved
| it with a regex.
|
| I think it's the sysadmin culture. If your scripts are used
| by thousands of different servers hosting custom web apps and
| strange databases you'll run into every possible bug fast.
| forgotmypw17 wrote:
| Ruby is great, and I know people who swear by it, but I've
| yet to come across a GNU/Linux distro which didn't come with
| Perl installed, while Ruby is not a given in the default,
| e.g. my current Manjaro.
|
| The compatibility really does stretch back all the way to
| '94.
| pseudostem wrote:
| On OpenBSD, some of the scripts or utils (mandoc) are
| written in Perl because the developers prefer it. There
| have been some email chains on the mailing lists about
| having Perl in base. Most of them are interesting to read.
| anthk wrote:
| The pkg_* suite it's written in Perl.
| SOLAR_FIELDS wrote:
| Curious - is there a reason to use Perl (Wall's latest version,
| 5 or whatever) in 2022 if one has no familiarity with the
| language? What would be the major advantage of using Perl over
| its closest analogues, some bastardization of Bash and Python?
| scruple wrote:
| I only touched Perl a little bit, at the start of my career in
| the mid-to-late 00s. I didn't hate it. For our specific use
| case, which was generating reports from large groups of text-
| based log files, it was wonderful.
|
| I'm curious, though, do you have any Perl programs you've
| worked on recently that are public? I'd love to take a look at
| how people are writing Perl these days...
| forgotmypw17 wrote:
| check my profile :)
|
| template default perl
| snorkel wrote:
| Perl rose to popularity because early web development was all
| about text processing (reading web forms and outputting HTML) and
| Perl made that easier (regex deluxe) than other choices on unix
| at the time. It became the lingua franca of web developers. Perl
| 5 made heavy use of symbols so it was visually noisy, and then
| Perl 6 came along and added even more magic meanings to other
| symbols, and that was a tipping point of perl's decline.
| Readability of code is paramount. Code is for machines to execute
| and for humans to understand. Perl code became both modernist
| abstract art, and Baroque in its intricacies.
| daneel_w wrote:
| > _Readability of code is paramount._
|
| For almost all languages, Perl included, this onus is mainly on
| the programmer. You can churn out gritty spaghetti in almost
| any language. Perl code doesn't have to look like what Perl
| programmers put out in the 90s. It's an old misconception that
| people refuse to let go of.
| ninkendo wrote:
| > You can churn out gritty spaghetti in almost any language.
|
| I hate this argument because it doesn't allow for _any_
| variation in the intrinsic readability of languages, or the
| style those languages encourage. Yes, you can write shitty
| code in any languages, but some languages _encourage_ it,
| while other languages _discourage_ it. I would say that Perl
| encourages unreadableness more than any of its peer
| languages, and the corpus of actual code out there is _much_
| more likely to be terse, unreadable noise than what you 're
| likely to find in most python or ruby projects.
| daneel_w wrote:
| > _" I hate this argument because it doesn't allow for any
| variation in the intrinsic readability of languages, or the
| style those languages encourage"_
|
| I don't understand what you mean by this. How ever does
| that argument mute Perl's dynamic expressiveness - which
| lends equally to unreadable syntax as much as clean syntax
| - or the commonly encouraged patterns in Python?
|
| > _" and the corpus of actual code out there is much more
| likely to be terse, unreadable noise than what you're
| likely to find in most python or ruby projects"_
|
| Because Perl saw in its infancy back in the 90s _much
| higher use_ than Python and Ruby did. It 's the same with
| PHP, which looked like shit in the 90s even if it didn't
| need to. Incidentally, PHP, too, suffers from stubbornly
| outdated criticism.
|
| I think you're too hung-up on the languages themselves, and
| forgetting that programmers, and software development and
| engineering as a process and as an art, evolved _a lot_ the
| past 20 years - much has happened also with how people
| write C today compared to the 80s and 90s.
| kstrauser wrote:
| I'm there with you. Taken to the extreme, this is why we
| don't use assembler for everything. I mean, it's Turing
| complete, right? And you can write readable assembler,
| true? And yet, we don't, largely because it's much easier
| to express large systems in other languages that are easier
| to write, read, and reason about.
|
| OK, so Perl isn't assembler. Still, it's a lot easier to
| write unreadable code in Perl than it is in some of its
| contemporary languages. You don't _have_ to, sure. You
| _could_ write clean, pretty Perl code. I know, because I
| 've seen it. But in my experience, that definitely wasn't
| the common case.
| TremendousJudge wrote:
| >You can churn out gritty spaghetti in almost any language
|
| But some languages make this much easier than others
| snorkel wrote:
| True you can write readable Perl code, but developers tend to
| adopt the predominant style of the community of each
| language, and the community was showcasing more brevity and
| cleverness than clarity
| peelle wrote:
| If I understand right you are saying that the # of symbols Perl
| employs makes it hard to understand or read, correct?
|
| TL;DR; I would say that you assertion is context sensitive. -
| For a junior Perl programmer or an outside expert those symbols
| are stumbling blocks. - For an intermediate Perl programmer and
| up, those symbols are tools that make the code more readable
| and expressive.
|
| I got two ways of looking at that. First, I would look at Perl
| in the context of language. It is a more context sensitive
| language than some of it's close competitors. When you
| understand those \ $ % @ & sigils you gain the ability to know
| at a glance the context in which data is being used.
| Understanding @_, $_, allows you to write shorter code without
| sacrificing meaning. Part of the Perl philosophy is TIMTOWTDI.
| Most of those special variables also have an English
| equivalent. Instead of using $) which I never remember I can
| use $EGID, or if I think that's not explicit enough then I can
| use $EFFECTIVE_GROUP_ID to really spell it out.
|
| The second way is that Perl has a steeper learning curve than
| it's close competitors. I see this like comparing Vim to
| Notepad++ and Emacs, or Haskell to well most other functional
| programming languages. Just because it took longer to learn,
| that doesn't mean it's better or worse at creating good code.
| It does mean that armchair pundits are less likely to be
| correct in their hot takes. They lack experience and
| understanding.
| G3rn0ti wrote:
| While ultimately everything is a matter of taste, the kind of
| people that hate sigils also tend to hate parentheses in
| Lisp. Both syntax elements are there for a reason.
|
| I believe sigils make string interpolations easy to support
| in a language. Consider JS that had to introduce an adhoc
| ,,${}" expression to support those eventually.
| scelerat wrote:
| I feel like PHP was the first big blow to Perl's king-of-the-
| web status. Python and especially Ruby+Rails knocked Perl off
| many people's radars for good.
| tootie wrote:
| As someone who spent many years loving Perl, I counter that
| literally every programming language is obtuse and overloaded
| with meaningless symbols.
|
| And I'd also credit Perl's rise to Lincoln Stein who wrote
| CGI.pm which was at the time the absolute state of the art for
| managing web applications with Apache and mod_cgi.
| mistrial9 wrote:
| yes and, one of Perl's design goals was literally "report
| generation" .. which it turns out, might be in HTML format
| hedora wrote:
| It can't do reports. It's a rubbish lister.
|
| It's also clearly not an anagram of REPL. I wonder if
| anyone ever figured out how to write REPL with a keyboard.
| I'd like to learn it some day.
|
| (REPL was written in a crazy character set and relied on
| custom printed punch cards. I think it was the perl of its
| day.)
| bmn__ wrote:
| CGI.pm is a port of Perl 4 cgi-lib.pl. Credit: http://cgi-
| lib.berkeley.edu/#credit
| cafard wrote:
| I first encountered Perl as Perl 4, which certainly had the @
| and $ sigils. I had been using Perl 5 for a while before using
| it in any web development. I think that Perl 6 contributed to
| Perl's decline much more by the long delay and certainly than
| by anything it had when it appeared.
|
| Edit: and Perl 4 had the % sigil.
| anthk wrote:
| What? Perl it's far more than a regex machine looking like line
| noise. If you think that about Perl, you'll get mad with AWK.
|
| To me Perl it's a better tool for anything better than shell
| scripting without needing to get dirty with C or Go.
| leoc wrote:
| Reposting my old comment
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10774245 :
|
| > People seem to have forgotten that when Perl evolved from being
| a better AWK to the paradigm example of the modern "scripting
| language", Larry Wall explicitly described this as a rejection of
| the Unix small-tools philosophy. http://www.linux-mag.com/id/322/
| ("But Perl was actually much more countercultural than you might
| think. It was intended to subvert the Unix philosophy. More
| specifically, it was intended to subvert that part of Unix
| philosophy that said that every tool should do only one thing and
| do that one thing well.") http://www.wall.org/~larry/pm.html The
| fact that getting things done with a Perlesque scripting language
| is now seen as the height of purist Unix propriety only shows how
| far gone the original Unix ideal now is. But moving to the
| scripting-glue model doesn't really get rid of small tools that
| endeavour to do one thing well, it just reimplements them inside
| the scripting-language universe as functions/objects, though with
| a more expressive and less burdensome common language that makes
| it easier for them to stay small while being correct and
| effective. The more expressive their shared language, the smaller
| [the individual tools in] a set of tools can be.
|
| >> Text just isn't a great medium for IPC.
|
| > Yes, in retrospect Unix's determination to know about nothing
| but binary or plaintext blobs and streams looks like an
| adolescent rebellion against the (apparently - I haven't used
| them) clunky record structures of '60s operating systems.
|
| [Extra text] added for clarification.
| dhosek wrote:
| Having dealt with the clunky record structures of 60s operating
| systems, they did have their advantages, but the spread of
| cross-platform tools in the 80s and 90s killed them since Unix
| only knew byte streams. There are, I think some vestiges of it
| in the distinction between text and binary files on Windows
| (assuming that this still exists), but otherwise Unix's
| everything is a stream of bytes has won. I kind of miss knowing
| that I had a file consisting of, e.g., 256-byte blocks.
| hedora wrote:
| The CODASYL vs relational calculus thing certainly had an
| impact too.
|
| Navigational databases had gotten incredibly complicated,
| allowing the relational people to lap them.
| tenebrisalietum wrote:
| I'd have to look into it, but I think the whole reason for
| text vs. binary demarcation is the fact that ASCII text (not
| Unicode, old-school ASCII with valid characters 0x01-0x7F)
| could be sent over a 7-bit serial interface and binary needed
| that extra bit so you had to introduce overhead to make sure
| everything reached the other side. Because you might have had
| actual 7-bit serial (or less) teletypewriters connected in
| the 60's.
| dhosek wrote:
| On DOS it also came into play in how line endings were
| handled.
| chasil wrote:
| It went further down than the OS. COBOL implements ISAM
| databases right in the language as part of the standard.
| GnuCOBOL has a few DBM options for this when building the
| compiler.
| andi999 wrote:
| Sounds like powershell.
| melling wrote:
| Perl: 1988
|
| Powershell: 2006
| joeberon wrote:
| thesuperbigfrog wrote:
| Powershell takes heavy inspiration and some syntax from Perl.
| tenebrisalietum wrote:
| Only because Perl takes heavy inspiration and syntax from
| Unix shells.
| thesuperbigfrog wrote:
| It's actually a bit more than that.
|
| In "Windows Powershell in Action", Bruce Payette (one of
| the co-designers of Powershell) states:
|
| "NOTE PowerShell uses the at symbol (@) in a few places,
| has $_ as a default variable, and uses & as the function
| call operator. These elements lead people to say that
| PowerShell looks like Perl."
|
| "In practice, at one point, we did use Perl as a root
| language, and these elements stem from that period. Later
| on, the syntax was changed to align more with C#, but we
| kept these elements because they worked well. In Perl
| terminology, they contributed significantly to the
| 'whipupitude quotient' of the language."
| bmn__ wrote:
| > whipupitude quotient
|
| That's an axis, not a quotient. See page 2/slide 3&4:
| <https://www.shlomifish.org/lecture/Perl/Newbies/vhll-
| slides....>
| anthk wrote:
| Perl had an amazing Win32 support back in the day, and
| still does.
|
| https://perldoc.perl.org/Win32
|
| https://metacpan.org/search?size=20&q=win32
|
| RAS, OLE, COM, ODBC. Perl did magick on NT/2K/XP.
| HeckFeck wrote:
| And it was (may still be) used in the Windows build
| environment!
| pmoriarty wrote:
| Incidentally, so does Ruby.
| simonh wrote:
| I think Unix's refusal to impose arbitrary structure on data is
| what has enabled a lot of the innovation and experimentation
| with alternative ways of organising and accessing data. Binary
| blob, SQL, NoSQL, key/value, column oriented, etc, etc Unix
| doesn't care. It just gets out of your way and lets you do your
| thing.
|
| A lot of projects tried to implement opinionated OSes to the
| point that the OS was really an application. I'm thinking of
| Sprite and Amoeba, which attempted to abstract out the network
| and present a unified interface to accessing resources, and
| fancy storage systems, but in doing so impose opinionated
| interfaces on that access.
|
| That's half way between an OS and an application like Hadoop,
| or Kafka, but you couldn't effectively develop something like
| Hadoop or Kafka, with your own optimisations and implementation
| tradeoffs on one of these things because the implementations or
| access models would clash.
| twic wrote:
| > Perl evolved from being a better AWK
|
| awk has named parameters! Perl was a step backwards!
| [deleted]
| ecef9-8c0f-4374 wrote:
| Well it's your lucky day. Named parameters are perl since
| 5.20 ... as an "experimental" feature ...
|
| Now you can write.
|
| use v5.20; use feature 'signatures';
|
| sub print_text( $param1 , $language = "perl", $years = 10 ) {
| say "I would have loved this $language $param1 more then
| $years years ago"; }
|
| print_text "feature"
| bmn__ wrote:
| This already was available more than ten years ago, you
| simply had to install a module.
| ecef9-8c0f-4374 wrote:
| I used to use perl5i for scripting, which had func().
|
| Point is. As soon as I tell someone "you have to use
| tarball/cpan/cpanplus/cpanminus to install the feature
| "named parameters" they leave.
|
| But now it's here
| nmfisher wrote:
| Interesting take, but as someone who still works regularly with
| the shell, I'd say there is still a place for small core utils
| connected together with pipes/textual streams.
|
| If we're talking parsing and chopping up text files, I can
| usually whip up something with awk/jq/cut/whatever in far less
| time than writing an equivalent Python script. There's a
| threshold where you prefer to switch to the scripting language
| for maintainability/testing, but the shell won't be going
| anywhere any time soon.
| hedora wrote:
| Most awk/cut/whatever commands can be done with perl -ne in
| about 2x the keystrokes, but you don't need to learn the
| other tools.
|
| In Python, the multiplier is much higher, and I could never
| get the oneliner stuff to work.
| cutler wrote:
| I don't understand why Python is touted as some kind of
| replacement for Perl when there are many things Perl does
| better and faster. Python isn't even optimised for one-
| liners so how can it be compared with Perl?
| biomcgary wrote:
| I use cut, grep, uniq, etc. a lot for processing largish
| files (multiple GB), but also use perl oneliners
| generously. Never took to awk for some reason. These days I
| write Go for anything larger than a oneliner, but I've
| added a lot of smallish Go CLI commands to use in pipes,
| too.
| peelle wrote:
| I agree with this threshold idea, and I would argue that Perl
| and probably Ruby also have a lower threshold for switching
| than Python. Nothing against Python.
| cosmiccatnap wrote:
| A developer has a problem they cannot solve and so they decide to
| use perl. The developer now has two problems.
| mistrial9 wrote:
| hah - "peak idiom" for that was when Mr Marketing and Sales
| from Hawaii, Guy Kawasaki, said that on stage to a bunch of
| developers. I heard it. It was because the Marketing and Sales-
| turned "software leaders" couldn't read a regex.
| giraffe_lady wrote:
| I write regex all the time and I can't read a regex. It's a
| powerful tool and that's a very valid complaint about it.
| nocman wrote:
| A regex can be difficult to parse, especially if it is very
| involved, but in Perl at least, there are ways to make it
| much easier ( using the /x modifier, for example :
| https://perldoc.perl.org/perlre#%2Fx-and-%2Fxx ). Comments
| and and having the regex itself be multiline can make
| things better, especially if you are creating a
| particularly complicated one.
|
| Damian Conway highly recommends using the combo of 'xms'
| his Perl Best Practices Book (
| https://www.oreilly.com/library/view/perl-best-
| practices/059... ).
|
| The revised and considerably newer "Modern Perl Best
| Practices" video series on O'Reilly's learning platform is
| particularly good also (
| https://www.oreilly.com/library/view/modern-perl-
| best/978149... ) - with lots of discussion of regexes.
| mistrial9 wrote:
| if my companion says "I am cold" on a warm day in the
| shade, then it is a valid complaint, since they probably do
| feel cold. You express empathy for the readers with "valid
| complaint" and from an educational, empathy point of view,
| sure, agree. Are regex's used by more people, or less
| people, than in 1999? Do people read, write and use them in
| code? for editing HTML pages? of course it is trivially
| true. That guy was saying to software developers "don't use
| regex it is a problem not a solution" .. I was there!
| tomc1985 wrote:
| Part of the fun of regex is learning to make sense of what
| looks like black magic
|
| I imagine asm programmers feel the same way
|
| fwiw I think this world needs less "it's too hard for me"
| and more "let me roll up my sleeves and dig into this"
| the_only_law wrote:
| > fwiw I think this world needs less "it's too hard for
| me" and more "let me roll up my sleeves and dig into
| this"
|
| I'm gonna need a hell of a lot more of my time back for
| that.
| daneel_w wrote:
| In my experience, Larry Wall's old comment holds true: Perl
| makes easy things easy, and hard things possible.
| newaccount2021 wrote:
| lvl102 wrote:
| I wrote my first web scraper in Perl. It was a great experience.
| I miss the community mostly.
| [deleted]
| dmux wrote:
| Perl was the first dynamic language I learned after taking most
| of my college courses in Java. It was an eye opening experience
| in many regards: ease of standing up a web app via CGI.pm,
| dynamic dispatch tables using anonymous sub procedures, an OOP
| system based on "blessed" data structures, access to the symbol
| table, etc. In the last couple of years I've gotten into learning
| Common Lisp and it's surprising how many similarities there
| appear to be. I'm actually kind of surprised that given Perl's
| ability to change packages in an ad-hoc fashion that some type of
| live programming system was never developed for it.
| [deleted]
| jkh1 wrote:
| Perl was the first language I used professionally and I used it
| almost exclusively for years. I don't understand all the negative
| comments about its use of sigils, I find them useful and I never
| got the impression that they made the code less readable but
| maybe that's because I was never taught the gospel of computer
| science :) I also appreciate the extended backwards
| compatibility. I still occasionally run decade-old code and it's
| still doing its job which means that writing code in perl was
| time well invested.
| hedora wrote:
| One thing I like about the sigils is that they make bad ideas
| hard to type.
|
| Want to pass me a hashtable of lambdas that return arrays of
| alternating functions and regexps?
|
| Go ahead. Show me how to invoke it. I'm waitng.
|
| Python (which has all of the type safety and expressivity of
| perl) allows such abominations to hide behind clean looking
| syntax.
|
| Sigils also improve readability. Bad Perl looks like serial
| port noise. Bad Python looks like good python.
|
| (In Python's defense, it has a nice ffi.)
| leadingthenet wrote:
| > Bad Python looks like good python.
|
| Never used Perl, so I can't really make an honest comparison.
| I do use Python at work, though, and I can assure you that is
| FAR from being true.
|
| In fact, I think this is so untrue that I urge you to check
| out essentially any code written in academia (especially
| projects involving numeric computation and data science). If
| you come back and make that same statement with a straight
| face, I'll eat my hat.
| SideburnsOfDoom wrote:
| > arrays of alternating functions and regexps
|
| many languages will allow you to succinctly express the
| concept of "the type of this element is a or b"
|
| e.g. typescript:
|
| https://www.typescriptlang.org/docs/handbook/2/everyday-
| type...
|
| Rust:
|
| https://doc.rust-lang.org/book/ch06-01-defining-an-enum.html
|
| F# :
|
| https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/fsharp/language-
| refe...
|
| IDK, allowing that kind of type to be declared seems like a
| good thing to me? Those links have good examples of where
| it's useful. You'd need a good reason to use actually
| "function or regexp" in actual code though.
| bmn__ wrote:
| You have misunderstood GP.
|
| Alternating functions and regexps looks like this:
| [\&some_function, qr/some_regex/, \&another_function,
| qr/another_regex/]
|
| This is distinct from the idea of sum types.
| tenebrisalietum wrote:
| Here's one reason why sigils could be considered to suck.
|
| `@array` - array of values.
|
| `$array[1]` - get element 1 of the array.
|
| `$array` - What do you think this does? Why can't we just
| `@array[1]`?
| hedora wrote:
| The last one produces a helpful error message at script
| interpretation time. @array[1] is probably also an error, or
| you're doing something very strange / wrong, and it'll stick
| out like a sore thumb during code reviews.
| csdvrx wrote:
| > `$array` - What do you think this does?
|
| I think it will throw an error if you declared my @array
|
| > Why can't we just `@array[1]`?
|
| Because that could return an array or a hash if you are
| dealing with structures likes arrays-of-arrays (AoA) or
| arrays-of-hashes (AoH).
|
| To my naive take, it makes much more sense to only identify
| high level objects to put them under one category (arrays,
| AoA, AoH -> @) then consider everything else as "uncertain"
| and default to $.
|
| Otherwise, you would have to declare AoA and AoH differently
| (ex: my @@AoA; my @%AoH;) and then the interpreter could see
| @AoA[1] and %AoH[1] as valid but %AoA[1] and @AoH[1] as
| invalid.
|
| I could see that as potentially having value to know at a
| glance what you are dealing with, but it might break many
| things, and casting to a new object with my %aoh_1 = %{
| $AoH[1] } makes more sense.
| [deleted]
| jwilk wrote:
| > Because that could return an array or a hash
|
| @array[1] returns a single-element list-like thing. It
| mostly works, but you get a warning:
|
| https://perldoc.perl.org/perldiag#Scalar-
| value-@%25s%5B%25s%...
| G3rn0ti wrote:
| Raku actually adopted that latter syntax. Although, it's
| optional as everything really becomes a reference anyway. So
| you don't need the ,,@" and ,,%" sigils any more.
| xorcist wrote:
| Perl has "contexts" as its type system. Sigils are a part of
| that.
|
| There's a lesson here somewhere that most people don't
| generally want to understand stuff. So stuff that's the least
| bit different don't tend to go mainstream, things like
| Haskell have a hard time. Perl was a bit different but just
| happened to go mainstream anyway, and that probably coloured
| people's feelings for it, for better and for worse.
| bmn__ wrote:
| > Why can't we just `@array[1]`?
|
| Because of slices. If you look at the complete table, you
| will never get confused again.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26578855
| gnubison wrote:
| Sigils indicate what an operation evaluates to, not what the
| input type is. You get used to it.
| zzo38computer wrote:
| Other programming languages also have sigils, such as LLVM,
| etc.
|
| I think that it does not make it less readable.
|
| In some programming languages they will be used to avoid
| clashes with reserved words, which I think is a good idea.
|
| Some programming languages (such as BASIC) have suffix sigils
| to indicate data type; some (such as OAA) have both prefix and
| suffix sigils.
|
| Some programming language may allow multiple sigils together in
| some cases (e.g. Raku and Free Hero Mesh) (in Raku they called
| the secondary sigils as "twigils").
|
| The meaning seems to vary depending on programming languages;
| some are used for similar purposes and sometimes they are used
| for different purposes.
|
| In Perl, the sigil can indicate scalar vs array (but not
| numbers vs strings), and in BASIC it can indicate numbers vs
| strings (but not scalar vs array, which is differently).
| lifefeed wrote:
| Larry Wall said once that he added sigils in Perl so he could
| freely add features to the language without conflicting with
| other's peoples variable names. It's a language design choice
| that makes sense for Perl's maximalism approach to features.
|
| Perl is very well thought out, in a way that I don't think gets
| enough credit. For example, the three loop controls (next,
| last, redo) are four letters long, which makes remembering them
| easier. In a world where I sometimes have to jump between
| languages I haven't used in a while, and I'm always forgetting
| what arbitrary word choice this particular language used for a
| feature, it's nice to come back to Perl and have a language
| where the grammar is a little bit less arbitrary.
| simonh wrote:
| I looked up postmodernism.
|
| >opposition to epistemic certainty and the stability of meaning
|
| Yep, that's Perl.
| rurban wrote:
| But don't forget the anti-movement "Modern Perl".
|
| > Minimalism describes movements in various forms of art and
| design, especially visual art and music, wherein artists intend
| to expose the essence or identity of a subject through
| eliminating all nonessential forms, features, or concepts.
| Minimalism is any design or style wherein the simplest and
| fewest elements are used to create the maximum effect. -
| wikipedia on Modernism
| iamalnewkirk wrote:
| http://wiki.c2.com/?WhyHatePerl
| mproud wrote:
| Perl is the sexiest programming language because "there's more
| than one way to do it."
| Aperocky wrote:
| Just reading this sentence give me horrors.
| kergonath wrote:
| It's a blessing because once you are comfortable with a Perl
| dialect, writing code is very efficient and fun. Perl is very
| expressive and can also be very concise. It's a curse,
| because reading other people's dialects can be quite
| difficult.
| Aperocky wrote:
| > reading other people's dialects can be quite difficult.
|
| That is why we send any code that cannot be read by a fresh
| CS grad back for rework. It turns out you can solve
| everything with very basic and straightforward syntax.
|
| But then we also don't use perl.
| jerf wrote:
| By the time I was done writing Perl, my Perl looked a lot
| like Python.
|
| It's also why I'm not really all that sympathetic to "but
| $NEWLANG doesn't let me write something that extracts
| from a hash and then map all the elements with an inline
| anonymous function, filter the results, and then invoke
| them all and put the results in a single array all in one
| line!". I worked for decades, plural, in languages that
| _did_ permit that, and what I learned is that the more
| professional the code gets, the less you should be doing
| that. By the time you 've broken it out in a way that
| won't confuse everyone, giving all the intermediate
| values professional-quality names and adding a few
| comments, it turns out the delta between Perl and things
| like Java or Go or other such "stodgy" languages has
| closed a lot. Not 100%, by any means, but closer, and in
| the meantime those stodgier languages have been steadily
| closing the gap from their end too. In the meantime I get
| a lot of value from the static guarantees those languages
| have.
| the_only_law wrote:
| > but $NEWLANG doesn't let me write something that
| extracts from a hash and then map all the elements with
| an inline anonymous function, filter the results, and
| then invoke them all and put the results in a single
| array all in one line!
|
| Isn't this what APL/J/Q are for?
| [deleted]
| DonHopkins wrote:
| At first glance I thought you wrote "Perl is the sexist
| programming language because..."
|
| https://geekfeminism.fandom.com/wiki/Perl_is_my_bitch
|
| >Perl is my bitch was a slogan used by the London Perl Mongers
| (a Perl user group) and printed on t-shirts ca. 2000.
|
| https://geekfeminism.fandom.com/wiki/Acme::Playmate_talk
|
| >At the Open Source Developers Conference in Melbourne in
| December 2006, Perl community member Adam Kennedy gave a
| lightning talk (a short (5 minute) talk for which he didn't
| have to submit an abstract) on the CPAN Acme::Playmate module,
| a joke Perl module designed to download the measurements of
| Playboy magazine Playmates from the Playboy website. (The
| 'Acme' namespace in Perl is the joke namespace.) During his
| talk Kennedy showed (twice) a single still photo of a Playboy
| model.
|
| https://geekfeminism.fandom.com/wiki/Randal_Schwartz
|
| >Schwartz often comes up in discussions of sexism in open
| source because of his open enthusiasm for Hooters restaurants,
| which he mentions frequently in professional contexts.
|
| >[...] In 2001, Randal's company, Stonehenge Consulting, ran a
| Hooters Wings Promotion at LISA, a sysadmin conference (an
| example of booth babes).
|
| >"Stonehenge ran a Hooters Wings promotion at the booth at LISA
| 2001. We gave away 1000 wings in about 45 minutes, with the aid
| of two Hooters girls Sarah and Lacey."
|
| https://web.archive.org/web/20080212061647/https://www.oblom...
|
| >notes on: perl lightning talks, impressionistically rendered>>
| Stumbling into the Perl Lightning Talks now. Randal Schwartz
| (looks like Randal. Certainly wearing Randal-like clothes. He's
| the Hooter's guy, right? I always get him and Tom Phoenix
| confused. Okay, definitely Randal.)
|
| https://geekfeminism.fandom.com/wiki/Stonehenge_OSCON_partie...
|
| >At OSCON, between 2001 and 2009 (several reports during this
| period, not necessarily every year), Stonehenge Consulting has
| held parties on one evening of the conference. At these
| parties, there are usually women present who are not otherwise
| connected to the conference. They have variously been reported
| as scantily clad, present to "entertain" the guests, etc. It is
| unclear whether these women are connected to the venues in
| which the events are held or are friends of OSCON attendees.
|
| https://geekfeminism.fandom.com/wiki/Michael_Schwern_v._Noir...
|
| >Michael Schwern, prominent Perl developer and keynote speaker
| at the National Center for Women & Information Technology's
| 2013 summit, was arrested in Portland, Oregon on Sept 19, 2013
| on two counts of misdemeanor domestic violence charges against
| his then-spouse Noirin Plunkett -- specifically, harassment and
| strangulation.
|
| https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2021/08/the-perl-foundation-...
|
| >The Perl Foundation is fragmenting over Code of Conduct
| enforcement. "I'm fresh out of ideas with regards to handling
| toxicity in the Perl community."
|
| >[...] I have personally used and enjoyed the Perl language for
| nearly 30 years, and it's distressing to see the bigotry and
| edgelording coming from prominent elements of the community--
| not to mention the board's failures to respond decisively. The
| Perl community is not the first to struggle with "culture wars"
| revolving around a code of conduct, either, which makes it all
| the more puzzling why its board seems incapable of formulating
| one.
|
| http://blogs.perl.org/users/sawyer_x/2012/08/this-is-not-tol...
|
| >This is not tolerated. By Sawyer X on August 31, 2012 10:46 PM
| under Rant.
|
| >There had been several posts recently about disgusting sexist
| idiotic behavior on PerlMonks. Most people know my opinion on
| these issues very well, but I don't think that's good enough. I
| think we need to actually bring it up and discuss it. I want to
| thank all the people who wrote about it and specifically Joe
| McMahon who both spoke of it on blogs.perl.org and on Perlmonks
| here. No, this is not to be taken lightly. And no, I will not
| shut up about this. And yes, my post is probably gonna be long.
| I'm sorry, but I need to put it out there.
|
| http://blogs.perl.org/users/joe_mcmahon1/2012/08/why-im-cons...
|
| http://www.modernperlbooks.com/mt/2012/08/you-dont-get-to-ch...
|
| http://blogs.perl.org/users/tinita/2012/08/to-be-or-not-to-b...
|
| http://blogs.perl.org/users/lichtkind/2012/08/to-say-schwern...
|
| http://www.perlmonks.org/?node_id=989181
|
| http://blogs.perl.org/users/joe_mcmahon1/2012/08/why-im-cons...
|
| https://perlmonks.org/?node_id=989879
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