I use Twitter. I like being able to tell my 1.5 friends where I'm at and having him maybe drop in on me. (God, I suck.) I found http://www.tweetscan.com and decided to search for mention of Perl, possibly to follow Perl users in the area, if I could find them. Here's a sample of what I got:
ceri : remembering why I hate Perl
PoBK : *Scream* This is why I HATE perl. There are no less, that 17 modules on CPAN to query domain Whois data! Seventeen!!!1oneeleven
ironsoap : We now come to the part of the show where I sing a little song about how much I hate Perl and its evil sibling Unicode.
calico : @mrballistic - re: DB-backed sites -yep, I worked with a company doing it with PERL backends and an Access DB back then - painful
neilfws : think the perl love affair might be over
jonsagara : I can't believe there are Web applications still written in Perl.
baseonmars : i want to stab perl in the head and make it's eyes bleed.
ba78 : "No one working on ES4 wants it to be like Perl 6." :)
chastell : ââ¬ËPerl style guideââ¬â¢. ahahaha *snort*.
neilfws : enough perl horror for today; need to go home and calm down
acdha : replacing hackish Perl with half as much better Python feels *so* good
etherjammer : @fadeaccompli, deep sympathy. - just occurred to me - are you going to have to learn Perl?
eosadler : @amndw2 Why perl? Consider trying ruby. "Learn to Program" by Chris Pine is a great intro book that I've been teaching from.
SlexAxton : Both of these return true in Perl: "Perl" eq "Perl" and "Perl" == "Dumb"
fortunetweet :
breathoffire : The whole "theres more than one way to do it" concept of perl can be tedious.
noahk17 : @bluesharpie5 So far everyone has said job #2. Perl is dead anyways. I'll be sure to tweet as soon as I hear something!!
mpstaton : @dweekly perl? isn't that so 2004?
offwhitemke : Primary experience example of less code is not better, Perl.
... to be fair, there were some positives mixed in, but the overwhelming negativity caught me be surprise. I'm trying not to be in denial about my language choices. This can't go without comment. Well, it could. My reply:
Perl haters: shut the hell up until you learn awk and sed, understand what they do that other languages don't, and why Perl took from them.
I know; boring old topic. Image changes like adding strong typing (typesafety.pm), publishing Best Practices, CPANTS, aren't going to change perceptions. How do we tell a whole generation of people first learning to program on purely procedural/OO languages what the *point* of Perl's existence is?
-scott
Re:bad by association
Aristotle on 2008-04-10T15:01:34
I think you are close, but I disagree with some of the details. For all the crap Python gets from Perl programmers (and I am one of those who dislike it), it’s not significantly worse or better than Perl at any particular task. The language has a few horrible flaws, but then Perl also has its own share of those. (I find myself chafing less at Perl’s flaws so that is the language I chose.) So I don’t think it’s that people reach for Perl in situations where they wouldn’t reach for Python.
However, I think “bad by association” applies anyway: back when Perl was the only game in town for web stuff, there was a flood of incredibly terrible programmers writing stuff in it. Some from that suck brigade went on to create PHP and then the rest of them all descended on it like flies on a carcass. But they left behind mountains of hairy code whose maintenance is the first encounter many people today have with Perl. The result is quite predictable.
Another problem that Perl has always fought with is that it’s too much unlike mainstream language – mostly in ultimately insignificant ways, but it’s still different. In contrast, Python feels a bit like a much cleaner and saner Java to me. Ruby feels more like Smalltalk, but of course that too (“everything is an object”) is familiar to Java folk. Perl cares more about feeling familiar to someone steeped in Unix – and that’s not a popular culture any more, in spite of all the Linux users. This unfamiliarity appears to make people approach Perl with a different mindset than their other programming: they set out with the intent of cobbling together something quickly and dirtily. The result is quite predictable.
Re:bad by association
chromatic on 2008-04-12T07:40:45
Perl cares more about feeling familiar to someone steeped in Unix...That's definitely true, and it's the source of some of the rougher edges of Perl. It's also the source of some of the brilliance of Perl.
