Re: [RFC] Adocacy Paradigm Shift: Perl - the Language for Smart People
On Tuesday 08 Mar 2011 17:41:19 Louis-Philippe wrote: 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. Well, one thing I like about Perl is the fact that lists are not references: http://use.perl.org/~Shlomi+Fish/journal/36493 It allows for some nice tricks. I also like that in Perl operators are not ambiguous (i.e: we have ., + and , which are the same operator in Python and other languages). I also prefer Perl's Moose to Ruby's built-in OOP which seems much less powerful and less flexible (though Ruby still has a cleaner syntax). These may not be such earth-shuttering advantages. Naturally, Perl people often say they stay in Perl due to CPAN, which is very comprehensive and which has very good infrastructure. It's hard to know how many people will want to write a program that incorporates many different use- cases, that is more often than not, very possible using CPAN (so-called mashups - only not necessarily web-based ones). Some people told me that most programmers hate the There is more than one way to do it philosophy of Perl. And naturally, we may need to just create usable CMSes similar to WordPress or Drupal which people can install on their servers, and it also seems I was unhappy with all the web-devel frameworks I've tried (with Catalyst, that is the king of the hill being the complex and idiosyncratic framework that it is.) 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. Right. Perl 6 has a lot to offer because as opposed to Ruby and Python which are an incremental step forward to Perl 5 (and sometimes a few small steps backward), Perl 6 is a huge step forward from all of them. Many of the Perl 6 features have been back-ported to perl 5 , and naturally while Rakudo is quite usable , it's still kinda slow, buggy, and very incomplete. I'm sure people are working on it, so it will be resolved at a point. Larry Wall said that the Perl 6 effort was The second system effect done right., and it's possible some second system effect projects in the past have proved to be popular. Well, Perl 6 does not aim to completely replace Perl 5 and perl5 and these languages will continue to evolve and be enhanced, but I still think Perl 6 should have been called differently (though it's too late to change now). Maybe we should ask ourselves which killer feature or features we'd like to backport from Perl 6 and implement it in perl5. Regards, Shlomi Fish P.S: a Python (and formerly Perl 4 and many other languages, down to an early version of Fortran) programmer I've talked with who had to study Objective-C to work on a Mac project said he thinks that Rubyists won't like ObjC because it's much less expressive and powerful than most dynamic languages. Some people have nicknamed Objective C Objectionable C or Subjective C or whatever. The main selling point of ObjC is the fact that it is the only usable language that can be used to write applications for the iPhone. However, while many companies would like to have an iPhone app just so they'll have an iPhone app that people would like (i.e: a bank or a site, or whatever), most of the developers who develop iPhone apps and wish to make money out of them have to pass through many hoops in the app store, buy a costly Macintosh computer to develop for it, and usually end up selling very few copies to be able to make a living from. In comparison to the Android, whose development environment is based on Eclipse, and which has a portable emulator, and which Google does not regular the App Store, the iPhone application developers are much unhappier, and I suspect it will eventually backfire at Apple. So I think many of the Ruby/Python or even Perl 5 crowd would
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
