Hi all,
in case you have not read Su-Shee's
http://blogs.perl.org/users/su-shee/2011/01/and-suddenly-youre-hip.html , you
should because she gives many useful insights there. One thing she says there
is that Vim became popular among the "hipsters" because using it was marketed
as relatively elite and:
<<<
Selling the steep learning curve as something what earns you Rockstar- and
Ninja-credit in your community (I'm assuming you're familiar with all this
Rockstar/Ninja meme...)
>>>
Now, a lot of us have tried to market Perl 5 as a language that is "easy to
learn" and "not so hard" and "not exactly Rocket science", but maybe we should
admit that while one can master a small subset of it pretty quickly, it is
still positively huge and has many dark corners and lots of small gotchas. So
in essence saying something like "Perl - do you have the brains for it?"
(possibly phrased better).
We can think of many more slogans like that, but I mean that just like Vim
takes some time to get used to, at least to people who are used to
Windows/KDE/GNOME or even Mac OS X editors (though you can be productive with
a very small subset) and because mastering eventually is very rewarding,
because one feels much more productive, so is Perl in essence: has a lot of
visual clutter at first, and has a steep learning curve, but you get to know
it.
A Python (and other things) programmer I talked with once told me: "I'm not
smart enough to write Perl.". He is a Technion graduate with Computer Science
with excellent written Hebrew and written English, and is certainly very
intelligent and smart (and I've known some less smart Perl programmers), but
he meant was that he didn't give the initial mental effort to understand the
Perl mentality. That was many years ago, and I kinda dismissed it, even though
I should have realised it was a good idea.
I can think of several downsides to this, too, like intimidating people who
think they are stupid than they really are and really underestimate
themselves. Like many "post-Feminist" (if that's the term) women who want to
stay at home and be supported by their husbands, despite being very
intelligent.
So I'm not sure if it's a good idea, but I think a defensive view that "Perl
is not rocket science" or "Perl is not that hard." may be even worse.
Maybe we should say something like "Perl - there's more than one way to do it.
Can you find them all?" or "Perl - TIMTOWTDY - how many you can find?" or
something.
So what are your thoughts about it?
Regards,
Shlomi Fish
P.S: after offering a bounty to create a scripting frontend (similar to awk or
perl's -e with the various flags) for Clojure, I got many comments and it
seems that the Clojure community has a very positive and healthy attitude
(which is more than I can say for Common Lisp, Scheme or even Ruby and Python
which seem to suffer from a lot of "penis envy" in various different ways.).
You can see the thread here:
*
http://groups.google.com/group/clojure/browse_thread/thread/e7cedcb1e8dbb6dd/a0488f9fa79e3989
One thing I was impressed from that instead of telling me "How many one-liners
you write per-day" or "there's no such thing as throwaway code" or "Paul
Graham/Larry Wall/MJD/whoever suck", they said "it would be a great idea but
we think Clojure is the wrong tool for the job, due to the initial startup
time of the JVM".
Similarly, I think we should admit that threads can often be a great idea, but
that they are not easy to utilise in Perl 5, due to its design, and that if
you feel you must use threads, you should look into a different technology.
I.e: lose the negative attitude.
--
-----------------------------------------------------------------
Shlomi Fish http://www.shlomifish.org/
Best Introductory Programming Language - http://shlom.in/intro-lang
Mastering 'cat' is almost as difficult as herding cats.
-- http://www.shlomifish.org/humour/bits/Mastering-Cat/
Please reply to list if it's a mailing list post - http://shlom.in/reply .
