[jnazario]

i'll wade in. note that i'm bigoted against perl, i'll say so clearly up front.

perl is better than shell scripting at automation, this much is true. perl has a strong use case there. had, i'll argue.

perl's idioms and structure promotes wonky, hard to read and hard to maintain code. it's true. get even the most die hard perl fan a beer or two and they'll wind up admitting it, sheepishly and quietly. but yeah, perl too easily promotes a mess. and when you have to maintain code, borrow code, etc .. readable code matters.

my biggest complaints about perl usually fall into the bucket that perl fans claim are its strengths. brevity, wit, etc. those wind up confusing almost all perl developers and users, in my experience, because you have to shift gears mentally to figure out wtf a piece of code is doing, what the developer intended it to do, and thus diagnosis is a pain. too many perl users just laugh and say, "yeah, i can't figure it out either." funny until you realize they're laughing about wasting your time. my second biggest complaint falls into the reusability of perl by its design. not so modular without some surgery (minor or major, depending). the C (or ruby or python) code that people trained on perl develop is, almost always, horridly inefficient.

CPAN is nice, i wish my language of choice (python) had as extensive a library so easy to use. and then you get into the mess of CPAN, which is littered with half completed, poorly documented modules. you wind up having two or three modules that do the same thing but are dependencies elsewhere or actually implement some promised functionality, etc. (cheeseshop, pip, etc yes ... but so much stuff isn't deployable like that is my point...)

the perl documentation library was a big selling point about 10 or 12 years ago, not so much now. everyone else caught up is my point. python, ruby, etc are now mainstream.

the "perl is everywhere" mantra used to be compelling, too. but python and ruby are just as widely available on systems and ... far more suited to long term development and maintenance than perl is. again, "better" languages for long term use and development are now mainstream. they weren't before.

i tend to sum all this up for someone with "perl sucks" or "don't use perl, it promotes brain rot". and no, i wont revisit my thinking. perl had its day, but i think the sun has set and rightfully so.

[pyre]

  > "don't use perl, it promotes brain rot"

  > and no, i wont revisit my thinking.

"I don't think this is the tool for the job, THEREFORE IT ROTS YOUR BRAIN! If you try to talk to me about that, I will chant, "I'M NOT LISTENING" over and over with my hands on my ears."

Really?

[jnazario]

"Really?" yes.

like another commenter said it's a discussion i've had before and haven't heard compelling arguments in favor of perl, so no i'm not interested in revisiting it.

that said it IS context dependent. i wont fire you for writing perl one-offs to maintain some systems or process some files. but i would argue against you for wanting to ship perl for the reasons i stated, with my main thesis being that your decision would jeopardize the project's future (assuming it had some future). i've heard the arguments before, like "you can write clean and maintainable perl" (which has analogues with "high performance java" and "long-term maintainable PHP"). the counterpoint is "sure, one can. but people rarely do. other tools promote those features more readily. pick one of them."

[pyre]

None of the reasons in your post would lead me to believe that Perl will 'rot your brain.' I didn't consider the majority of your post to be a flame/troll, just your honest opinion. It was the "Perl eats babies, and you can't convince me otherwise, nyah!" at the end that sort of irked me.

[jnazario]

i very firmly believe the following:

first, that some languages promote decent coding practices, while some actively encourage bad ones, either through crappy idioms, bad docs and a lousy community, or a lack of immediate penalties.

second, that where you spend much of your time coding has a significant effect on how you think about problem solving, consequences, etc. the practice of programming builds behaviors, modes of thinking, and values.

finally, if it isn't clear, i consider perl's features to be substandard to long term coding. the values it places on hacked up gimmicks (under the guise of "more than one way to do things" and "see! it's a one liner!") is a large part of this.

therefore "brain rot" in this case isn't equivalent to years of meth use, but rather a failure to appreciate crap designs, a failure to perform sound engineering when you write code, and a failure to think about the future of your code. i've seen the products of people who write code professionally, with them having learned through years of coding perl, and it is not pretty. lots of them.

keep calling me closed minded on the topic, i wont disagree. but the end result is that when someone tells me that perl is their language of choice and i'm hiring for a person to write code, it's a deep hole they have to get out of right away or i won't hire them, nor will many of the people i work with.

[pyre]

  > the values it places on hacked up gimmicks (under the
  > guise of "more than one way to do things" and "see!
  > it's a one liner!") is a large part of this.

I'm curious where there is official documentation of Perl as a language putting emphasis on "See! It's a one-liner!" Sure Perl has things like Perl Golf[1], but I could equally point you to The International Obfuscated C Code Contest[2]. That doesn't prove that C as a language encourages you to intentionally obfuscate your code.

  > when someone tells me that perl is their language of choice
  > [...]  i won't hire them

Perl isn't my language of choice, but I'm not sure that I want to work for someone that has such a view of the world. You're attempting to use a small piece of data ("I like to program in Perl") to extrapolate a whole lot about a person.

[1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perl_Golf_Apocalypse

[2]: http://www.ioccc.org/

[buster]

I am wondering why it is as it is. I think it may be because of perls abundance of short cryptic symbols that people feel somehow "proud" to 1) know what "while(<>){print if($.==2 || $& && !$x++); $.=0 if (/^--+$/)}" does and 2) to make it even shorter. Because with )(!§&/$?(=)% with hell a lot of meanings you could write entire perl scripts based on special characters.

A good example is http://www.nntp.perl.org/group/perl.beginners/2009/01/msg106... that i just found googling for perl one liners. The OP want's to know what this line does, the first answer is "you can make it even shorter!". Somewhat explains what i try to say ;)

Surely there is a lot of clean perl code out there but from my experience at customers (i'm consultant) what happens in-house in some development departments looks very very very different. Then again i've seen a lot broken, half-tested and unmaintained CPAN modules as well.

[chromatic]

the values it places on hacked up gimmicks

If you catch me using a butcher knife to get the cork out of a wine bottle, feel free to call me a fool. That shouldn't reflect badly on the makers of knives or corkscrews or wine bottles.

i've seen the products of people who write code professionally, with them having learned through years of coding perl, and it is not pretty. lots of them.

I've read a lot of code from people who've never learned a whit about programming. The lesson I take from that experience is that some languages make it easy for people who aren't interested in programming to get things done without having to learn much about programming or design or maintenance or coding standards.

That said, warnings and strictures should have been the language's default behavior for programs, not one-liners.

[new299]

I think the argument might be that it's easy (easier than many languages) to slip into writing bad Perl, which promotes brain rot, it also sounds like it's a discussion he's had many times before... and perhaps isn't too interested in having again.

[pyre]

  > it's easy (easier than many languages) to slip into
  > writing bad Perl

Bad programmers will write bad code no matter the language. I don't like this idea that the language can somehow force people to write better code, or that it should.

[buster]

See it that way: A bad programmer that can use such a variety of difficult to read symbols in a language (which perl clearly has) will just use all of them and the result will be horrible to read and understand. Also, often times python really has one obivous way to do a specific thing. Last time i was googling for some perl code (i think it was for some array handling) i have found at least 10 equally good totally different way on perlmonks in one thread. That's not bad per se but it promotes that every one uses another line of code and the bad ones choose the lines that may have unintended side effects but work in 90% of the usecases.

[new299]

> I don't like this idea that the language can somehow force people to write better code

Why is this a bad idea? Do you also object to Perl Critic? Or say having a policy of using Perl Critic?

[pyre]

Usage of Perl Critic and claiming that Perl 'rots your brain' are miles apart.

Also, I don't see anyone claiming that Python will 'rot your brain' because PEP-8 isn't enforced by the language.

[berntb]

You're arguing with a Karma 30 account.

It took some time before the trolls woke up in this thread.

(I'd love to get access to the HN logs and check IPs, to see if the trolls where sloppy with using alternative access and can be identified.)

[cygx]

Using Perl will not rot your brain any more than any other programming language - balance is key: Look at other languages and don't become a one-trick pony.

If you look at the popular scripting languages (Perl, Python, PHP, Ruby, Javascript), Perl is the only one that gets freaking variable declaration right, so I'd be pretty careful when casting stones.

[buster]

Exactly my feelings. Usually when i bring this up on HN it's just a heavy downvote and i gave up with it.. I must really say that the most horrifying times in my current job over the last years have not been critical situations like server failures or the like but the countless hours i spent on debugging and "cleaning up" the perl scripts of other people. Since then i made clear that i don't touch those anymore, someone else can waste their time. Especially when you spent more on fixing some script then it would take you to rewrite it in python..

[harbud]

I agree on several of your points. CPAN is kind of meh right now, since Python/Ruby/node.js are quickly catching up (or have passed it, even). You can quite easily find libraries existing in other languages and not in CPAN.

For me it now boils down to: sunk cost (if you're already familiar with Perl, it makes sense to keep doing it in Perl) and some features that Perl currently really excels at (variable scoping, regex integration, Unicode).

[new299]

Yea, I kind of agree with some of this. My coworkers are big fans of Perl Critic because it enforces a standard (and I assume one that promotes cleaner Perl). But it often seem to me that the popularity for Critic is somewhat of a language failing.

I guess the argument could be main that it allows you to write hacky little scripts which could can then apply Critic too and slowly refactor into large projects. I'm not entirely sure I buy it.

[prakashk]

the popularity for Critic is somewhat of a language failing

By this argument, Javascript (JSLint), C# (StyleCop), C (lint), Python (Pychecker and Pylint) all have failings.

[buster]

No, whereas pylint promotes a good style, same space between function definitions, etc. this is something that is heavily missing in perl. Python also doesn't have (or actually it's almost never used) global variables and goto and all that crap that people still use in perl code. On of the first things i do when having to work on others perl code is to run Critic and first fix the myriad of warnings that come up. With Pylint it's typically just some minor stuff. With Critic it's typically some major stuff that's plainly wrong.