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in reply to Re^10: Reaped: Re: why Perl5 will never die
in thread why Perl5 will never die
> The idea that the effort that went into Perl6 would have magically been redirected into Perl5 is faulty thinking
Of course, but do you deny the Osborne effect?
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Re^12: Reaped: Re: why Perl5 will never die
by Your Mother (Archbishop) on Oct 31, 2018 at 21:17 UTC
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In this case I believe I do deny the Osborne effect; I think something of the opposite happened. I’m a believer in it on general terms. This story doesn’t fit at all as I see it.
Perl died in the 90s.
Back the to the big bag of anecdotes. In ’98 I was at Amazon.com. Tons of the infrastructure tools, almost all of the customer service and order manipulation tools, all the Intranet, the templating system for the actual site catalog: Perl. And the company leadership and dev managers were dying to flush it all. The company was hiring new devs hand over fist. They were trained on C and Java and nothing else. To them Perl was a joke scripting language for plebs and junior sysadmin janitor types and people who didn’t need to write enterprise level code. By ’99 the decision to go ahead and pull the toilet lever was in full swing. All those customer/order tools were being replaced with Java. The important Intranet tools I wasn’t personally authoring were being written in Ruby. I’ve told this story before.
This was before Jon Orwant did his Captain Quint impression with coffee mugs standing in for chalkboard. Regardless of the wasted time and lack of execution that followed, Jon Orwant was right. Larry Wall was right. The echo chamber and the inordinate fondness many JAPHs feel for the language had, and continues, mysteriously, to blind people. PHP couldn’t be laughed off just because it’s awful. It was awful but it was becoming deployable in ways Perl never has been. Perl was on a one-way track to the grave. Period. I was in the center of the Internet tech hub and no one there wanted Perl who didn’t already know it. And a metric crapton of those who did know it found Ruby more seductive and shiny and they left for it.
The only reason Perl is forever sinking is lack of tools and applications. There is nothing inherently better in the other dynamic languages. In fact, Perl has been objectively better than all of them in some regards like regex, Unicode, command line handiness, and defect density. The lack of tools and apps is not Perl’s fault. It’s not the porters fault. It’s not Perl6’s fault. It’s not Python. It’s the Perl community’s fault. And from this point forward, ECMAScript—unless things like the terribly interesting miracle haukex has pulled off in webperl take off—because ES is turning into an amazing back end language and its “CPAN” subjectively looks to have soundly thrashed Perl’s a couple of years ago already and is still booming.
Perl came back from the dead a bit c2005 because of Catalyst and DBIx::Class and Moose and the flood into the Tiny:: space; and, I argue, because of Perl6. Perl was dead to the world. Perl6’s hype brought attention to the name that landed on Perl5 because Perl6 was vaporware. The relationship between Perl6 and Moose is also well known and Moose led to an OO race that improved that space beyond measure. Then Plack came and reclaimed some lost ground. It did it by copying tools in Ruby and Python. Tools JAPHs coulda-woulda-shoulda written first.
Anyway, this is why I get crotchety on the topic. If you don’t like the state of Perl, go build something that will change it. Or stay and wail at the wake. It’s not ending any time soon and the food is pretty good after all.
Epilogue for those who haven’t heard Auntie Crankybritches stories three times already. The Java switch for Amazon service tools backfired massively and wasted $millions, 18 months, required complete retraining, led to a mostly Perl rewrite of the Java rewrite of the original Perl tools. The Ruby stuff also backfired, leading to an app outage on the eve of its use. It was also roundfiled. Not choosing Perl was a mistake and led to huge losses and a lot of internal bad will.
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> This was before Jon Orwant did his Captain Quint impression with coffee mugs standing in for chalkboard.
?
update
- Jon Orwant ?
- Captain Quint ?
- coffee mugs ?
- chalkboard ?
- impression ?
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Heh. I both date and isolate myself with American pop. :P Quint is the boat captain from Jaws. There is a community meeting going on about ONOES, WAT DO? getting out of hand, lots of cross-talk, no progress or focus. From out of the din: …SCREEEEE… Quint has the floor.
Orwant's bio from O'Reilly: a well-known member of the Perl community, founded "The Perl Journal" and co-authored O'Reilly's bestseller, Programming Perl, 3rd Edition. There was a meeting of Perl luminaries at a 2000 conference discussing what to do about Perl's faltering. SMASH! CRASH! BAM! KAPOW…! Orwant has the floor; Larry describes it–
We spent the first hour gabbing about all sorts of political and organizational issues of a fairly boring and mundane nature. Partway
through, Jon Orwant comes in, and stands there for a few minutes
listening, and then he very calmly walks over to the coffee service
table in the corner, and there were about 20 of us in the room, and he
picks up a coffee mug and throws it against the other wall and he
keeps throwing coffee mugs against the other wall, and he says "we are
fucked unless we can come up with something that will excite the
community, because everyone's getting bored and going off and doing
other things".
And he was right. His motivation was, perhaps, to make bigger Perl
conferences, or he likes Perl doing well, or something like that. But
in actual fact he was right, so that sort of galvanized the meeting.
He said "I don't care what you do, but you gotta do something big."
And then he went away.
That was the moment the spark of Perl6 happened. I wish that call to arms had been channeled differently… hindsight being items in rearview mirror are closer than they appear and all; then again, how, who, what? So. 18 years later, here we, well, a good few of us still and some new friends, are. :P
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The only reason Perl is forever sinking is lack of tools and applications. There is nothing inherently better in the other dynamic languages. In fact, Perl has been objectively better than all of them in some regards like regex, Unicode, command line handiness, and defect density. The lack of tools and apps is not Perl’s fault. It’s not the porters fault. It’s not Perl6’s fault. It’s not Python. It’s the Perl community’s fault.
Perl would be in a very different place if CPAN had supported
application authors, as well as they support module authors, by
maintaining the script archive1. Perl very successfully supports
programmers helping programmers but Perl fails to build a bridge
between programmers and end users. With no central repository
for apps and no tools to easily browse, install and update them
we've been doomed to support ourselves for decades (and Matt's
Script Archive2 is still online).
Perlmonks, of all places, shut
down the Code Catacombs3 for no apparent reason. Those of us
who write applications get no support from the Perl community.
We are shunned and ignored, or if we try to share apps here:
downvoted and ridiculed; it makes no sense. The WWW is the
most important GUI the world has ever seen and what does
Perl do? Eject CGI from the core! Perl hates us.
I have tens of thousands of lines of kick ass Perl apps in use
every day on my desktop that no one else will ever get to
benefit from because there is no decent place to put them
online. I suspect the DarkPAN of applications written by this
neglected part of the community dwarfs CPAN by several orders
of magnitude. It's a shame, and no one cares...
- www.cpan.org/scripts/
- www.scriptarchive.com/
- www.perlmonks.org/?node=Code%20Catacombs
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I don't disagree with your sentiment.
Perlmonks, of all places, shut down the Code Catacombs for no apparent reason.
Here's the reason (it was an oddly-implemented section whereas CUFP is a standard section and therefore easier to maintain). Why not post in CUFP?
We are shunned and ignored, or if we try to share apps here: downvoted and ridiculed
Really? WebPerl is one of the best things to happen this year and the posts about it here have been neither downvoted nor ridiculed. Perhaps you have a counter-example?
there is no decent place to put them online
Decency is subjective of course, but in addition to Cool Uses For Perl there is GitLab, github, SourceForge*, etc. And there's nothing to stop you putting apps on CPAN if you so wish.
* Not my favourite
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I also was on board with your post for the first bit. This and the follow up–
I have tens of thousands of lines of kick ass Perl apps in use every day on my desktop that no one else will ever get to benefit from because there is no decent place to put them online.
–make you sound like logicus to me. I have about 2,000 CGIs in old trees and uncountable scripts and one-liners plus a few hundred modules I never released. They’re where they are and where they’ll stay because they’re a) an embarrassing mess, b) too specific and nearly worthless as a general release, or c) overly ambitious, never to be finished, v0.00_000001. Miles and miles lie between diligent, busy, prolific and polished, professional, potable. There are and always have been many places to distribute personal software.
Webperl is an amazing piece of work and is being judged on that merit and the tremendous street cred haukex has built up with excellent post after excellent post; it is not remotely a reboot of PerlScript which is what I take the 2000 reference to be about.
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