[RFC] Adocacy Paradigm Shift: Perl - the Language for Smart People
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 .
Re: Sony support uses Perl
Hi Gabor, On Sunday 15 Aug 2010 08:33:09 Gabor Szabo wrote: On Fri, Aug 13, 2010 at 7:55 PM, Joel Limardo joel.lima...@forwardphase.com wrote: Do we keep a list of current companies that are using Perl anywhere? I just noticed that Sony Support appears to be using Perl: http://esupport.sony.com/US/perl/model-home.pl?mdl=HIDC10 There is an old and out of date list on TPF wiki https://www.socialtext.net/perl5/index.cgi?companies_using_perl but I don't think there is a real added value in such list. As Jan pointed out almost every company uses Perl in one form or another. I think it would be a better form to gather companies that support Perl in one form or other. e.g. by letting and encouraging its employers to work on perl core or CPAN modules during work hours or by sponsoring various Perl events or by sponsoring other aspects of the Perl community. I agree. I think that a list of all companies that use Perl and do not admit that would first-of-all be a problem to compile, and secondly, may be defamation. I think it may be the NASA uses Python vs. NASA uses COBOL syndrome - NASA (or whoever) uses a lot of stuff (including COBOL and Fortran on old VAX machines), but is not going to boast about using, say, COBOL, because people hate it. What we can do is try to make Perl hip again (like Su-Shee noted in her post) by building a certain unique and non-defensive Perl image, that will make a lot of companies admit that they are using Perl. One of the problems with Perl is that back in the old WWW fever, when early versions of Perl 5 were practically the only sane thing to use, people wrote a lot of Perl 4-like code in Perl 5 due to ignorance (I know I did.). Many of these ancient CGI scripts matured into CPAN modules or alternatively some popular FOSS or commercial or popular Internet-facing web-sites. However, those that extensively use Perl are now more well-entrenched sites like Amazon.com , livejournal.com , typepad , etc. which are very popular but not considered web 2.0 (bleh!) or hip enough. (And based on a vague feeling, I think Google is starting to become well-entrenched too.). Fashions come and later become well-entrenched and everyone still does them, but no one is proud of it because they are no longer hip. If we can make Modern Perl 5 appeal again to younger audience, perhaps by building an elitist image of a quirky language for rockstars who can appreciate a steep learning curve, but followed by great expressivity and the power and robustness of CPAN afterwards, and also a vibrant community, we maybe can accelerate the Perl renaissance, and get more people to admit that they use Perl. For a while it seems that Vim was losing esteem among the hipsters in favour of TextMate and similar editors, while now it may seem that it has become the new it editor among them again, so technologies *can* make a perceptive comeback, although many of them don't. Regards, Shlomi Fish -- - Shlomi Fish http://www.shlomifish.org/ http://www.shlomifish.org/humour/ways_to_do_it.html The American Lottery - all you need is a dollar and a dream. We will take the dollar, but you can keep the dream. Please reply to list if it's a mailing list post - http://shlom.in/reply .
Re: [RFC] Adocacy Paradigm Shift: Perl - the Language for Smart People
I would agree that there could be many people who try to learn and do difficult tasks. I guess when I started learning Perl that was one of the things at the back of my mind. However it needs to be seen how many people have an affinity to intellectual challenges that Perl has to offer. As you rightly said it could work the other way around too that people who might have learnt Perl would pick something else because they think they are not smart enought but the bigger problem, in my opinion, is people who seek the coolness quotient and then end up frustated not being able to learn it sufficiently to do something productive. I thinks Pythons USP is it's argument of being quick to learn with many saying that you could learn it in a week. Someone who wants to learn a language quickly is someone who doesn't want to spend time learning and get to doing. I feel such a person will stick to the programming language they already know and won't even think about learning anything else. I haven't seen any stats but have a feeling that there are more newcomers to Python and Ruby that there are to Perl because of this reason, again I would like to stress on this point that this is my opinion and I could be wrong. Need to test this. Regards, Xaero. On Tue, Mar 8, 2011 at 2:41 PM, Shlomi Fish shlo...@iglu.org.il wrote: 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. --
Re: [RFC] Adocacy Paradigm Shift: Perl - the Language for Smart People
Some stand on the idea that learning a new language is worth it these days if it brings you to new programming paradigms and/or new possibilities. In that light, I see Bash scripters could be seduced by Perl, but the gang in the Cool-Factor-Zone/Ruby/Python are mostly inclined to move toward Erlang, Scala, Clojure, Haskell, Objective-C, Javascript... not Perl, because as flexible and great as Perl can be it doesn't offer much new advantages to these peoples. I think Perl should learn to get back to enviable position by looking at the programming language ecosystem in general and ask itself where it is positionned in this jungle and what is it's unique offer. IMHO one good cousin to compare to is Lua... there is not much Cool-Factor in there, but it offer unique features: is really small, embedable, extendable, fast (and by far the fastest), compilable to bytecode, and else. Lua is a growing star, not because it has a special personality, like Perl, but because it has features... Not that personality is bad, look at Ruby and Python, both have strong personalities, but it's only a small fraction of makes these killer languages. Perl need to know its goal and perfect it. Some of you might think the goal is known and done, but think again, Perl could shine brighter for what it is if it knew pragmatically what it's destiny is. no offenses, only my 2 cents, L-P 2011/3/8 Xaero groundxa...@gmail.com I would agree that there could be many people who try to learn and do difficult tasks. I guess when I started learning Perl that was one of the things at the back of my mind. However it needs to be seen how many people have an affinity to intellectual challenges that Perl has to offer. As you rightly said it could work the other way around too that people who might have learnt Perl would pick something else because they think they are not smart enought but the bigger problem, in my opinion, is people who seek the coolness quotient and then end up frustated not being able to learn it sufficiently to do something productive. I thinks Pythons USP is it's argument of being quick to learn with many saying that you could learn it in a week. Someone who wants to learn a language quickly is someone who doesn't want to spend time learning and get to doing. I feel such a person will stick to the programming language they already know and won't even think about learning anything else. I haven't seen any stats but have a feeling that there are more newcomers to Python and Ruby that there are to Perl because of this reason, again I would like to stress on this point that this is my opinion and I could be wrong. Need to test this. Regards, Xaero. On Tue, Mar 8, 2011 at 2:41 PM, Shlomi Fish shlo...@iglu.org.il wrote: 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
Re: [RFC] Adocacy Paradigm Shift: Perl - the Language for Smart People
On 03/08/2011 09:11 AM, Shlomi Fish wrote: 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). Reminds me of a lightning talk I was giving ten years ago :-) Why Perl Advocacy is a Bad Idea http://mag-sol.com/talks/advocacy.html Not to be taken entirely seriously. Dave... -- Dave Cross :: d...@dave.org.uk http://dave.org.uk/ @davorg
