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by frou_dh 4 days ago
> Any body who saw a Perl programmer do over a weekend, what they would take a year to do in their language(especially Java and Python)- had a deep rooted seething envy at Perl and Perl programmers. So they went around almost on religious crusade to have Perl gone. This was done entirely to crush competition. They just didn't want other people to wield a power they didn't have. Lisp has had a similar arc of development over the decades.

Isn't that the fate of the archetypical loser? To end up on the sidelines thinking "I'm actually the smartest and most powerful, the wider world just isn't capable of appreciating it".

I saw someone recently say something like... they wished contemporary Lisp people put anywhere near as much effort into creating lots of great software with Lisp as they do extolling Lisp.

1 comments

Have literally seen a 'architect astronaut' crap on Perl in some 2 hour long call, and eventually had his way with getting the management to approve Java. This was mid-2000s

When our team initially budgeted it, 4 guys over 6 months were enough to get this over the finishing line. The java team took over took more than 3 years, and close to 30 people. It was a AbstractClassFactoryFactorySingletonDispatcher mess with spring decorators all over. Which quite honestly was quite ironic because the original case against Perl was it was hard to read.

The java code was easily 30x more verbose, no body at the end knew how to maintain it. It was all about the guy getting to own his own team, promotions, bonuses, raises etc.

Have seen the same story repeat over and over again, everyone knew they wanted Python because they could get to inflate their headcounts.

Its one of things about tech, its not the good tech that wins, its the tech that helps with office politics wins at the end of they day.

After golang came along a lot of these java things too went out of fashion. Curiously enough golang does feel a lot perly to use. And Python has long moved away from its minimalism activism days. To that Python has transformed into the same feature bloat it once accused Perl of.