[chrisseaton]

I think Perl fell victim to a huge change of fashion around the 2000s.

'There's more than one way to do it' and the whimsical, deliberately slightly obtuse design of Perl used to be what people valued.

Then something happened (perhaps it was how people started building much larger apps in 'scripting' languages, to use an out-dated term) and I think to most people under 35 deliberately having 'more than one way to do it' sounds like an atrocious idea and something they don't want anything to do with. Same with linguistic whimsy in their language design - they don't want to have to look up why a method to do with objects is called 'bless' for example.

Look at the success of languages like Go, which are the polar opposite of Perl's philosophy.

[goto11]

Perl is a great language if you are a single developer. I think there is some "reverse network effect" for Perl, where people might enjoy writing in the language but nobody enjoys having to maintain Perl written by someone else. So basically you don't encourage others to use it.

[autoexec]

> I think there is some "reverse network effect" for Perl, where people might enjoy writing in the language but nobody enjoys having to maintain Perl written by someone else.

I think you might be right. Perl is a lot of fun to write, and it's still my language of choice for log parsing and automating sys admin stuff, but while it's possible to write Perl in a way that's easy for others to maintain and understand most people don't (less fun?) and for small projects it's even sometimes faster to rewrite something than mess with what someone else left you.

Actually... now that I think about it, is it ever a joy to work with someone else's mess in any language?

[goto11]

> Actually... now that I think about it, is it ever a joy to work with someone else's mess in any language?

Not really, but not every language is equal. Wen developing for my own sake, I enjoy Scheme or Haskell, but I would rather maintain code written in C#.

[agumonkey]

Interesting question, maybe computing was still a wildlife space to explore and 'more than one way' was felt like a challenge in creativity.. then the field decided it had to become industrial (the term that comes to mind thinking about all the professors talking about UML, diagrams, build swap-in packages like ICs) and suddenly, standardization is the only way.

[ThinkBeat]

C# keeps accumulating "more than one way to do it with every (too frequent) update.

A guy who is an expert lets say C# 2.0, would have no way to just read code for C# 9 that took advantage of new features and syntax.

It can be procedural, object oriented, functional, in a limited way aspect oriented, it can be data oriented in a way and all of those at the same time.

[polynomial]

And then there was the rise of Javascript, which also allows for many many ways of doing the same thing.

[chrisseaton]

Hmmm I'm not sure I think so? JavaScript is a pretty simple and compact language. Referencing object fields yes... but that's because of a uniform model of arrays and objects afforded different syntaxes. That's not really what I mean.