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by AlexandrB 2378 days ago
What’s wrong with Perl?

Also, with no C macros there are no C generics. I wish the author luck in maintaining that mess.

3 comments

> What’s wrong with Perl?

Looking at their central axioms, I would guess:

1 - simple software breaks in simple ways: weak, dynamic typing means a lot of problems trivially solved by static and/or strong typing.

2 - simple tools: no idea. I remember cpan being fairly great and perldoc being excellent.

3 - one correct way to do thing versus perl's TMTOWTDI central theme

4 - dependencies are part of the system: lots of CPAN modules, so there's a tendency to import black box modules instead of writing it yourself and retaining ownership.

5 - standards are useful but full of cruft: perl has a much larger standard lib than, say, Go or Python as far as I understand.

As to why it would be what's wrong with git: after a cursory glance at the git repo (0), I would guess the problem is that it still contains .perl files?

[0]: https://github.com/git/git/search?l=Perl

With no C macros there is no C at all.

This kind of arbitrary simplification is particularly unfortunate because C is a professional, Dangerous tool; removing the main way to organize code is like simplifying a chainsaw by omitting power switch interlocks.

Go doesn't have generics either, and I've found it to be incredibly useful and productive.