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Well I'm saying that "you just didn't bother to learn it, duh" is not an equally valid argument for different languages; it's much less valid for Perl than it would be for Python. It rewards your efforts much less. Perl is notoriously a language that had desperate criticism among its users even by the mid 90's ($[ and $] stuff comes to mind), quickly led to the creation of Ruby and famously "forked itself" with what is now known as Raku. Now I have barely spent any time with the oldschool Perl but trust me, I have put a lot of effort into learning Raku, the language that was meant to fix Perl. Whenever something that "seemed like a good idea at first but it's actually harmful" shows up, it's usually Perl's legacy. I'm thinking of things like the conceptual mishmash between a single-element list and a scalar value (or in general, trying hard to break down variables arbitrarily into list-alikes, hash-alikes and the rest of the world), the concept of values that try to implicitly pretend they are strings and numbers at will, or the transparency of all subroutines to loop control statements which is some next level spaghetti design. If you ever actually use something like this, you introduce a brand new level of complexity, somewhere inbetween a "goto" and a "comefrom", so I would really think about if this was worth learning at all. Oh right... from what I remember, it was also Perl that fostered this idiotic idea that a name of a concrete thing could be overloaded to be a namespace as well, and a concrete Foo::Bar could very well be something that has no logical relation to a concrete Foo. Moreover, I'm quite sure Perl invented this nonsensical distribution-module dichotomy where you are supposed to depend on modules, despite the smallest publishable and installable unit being a distribution. There are three outcomes with that:
- if the distribution contains only one module: what was the point of drawing the distinction?
- if the distribution contains tightly coupled modules: you can pretend to only depend on one of the modules but in fact you are depending on the whole distribution together
- if the distribution is a collection of unrelated modules: why are you trying to encouple the metadata when this will make the versioning meaningless? I can only hope that it's somehow better than Raku but the whole principle is just an anomaly. And you know, then these people move around in the world, pretending that all of this is just normal and you just have to learn it. Well guess what, there is a reason people might want to put that effort into something else. |