Comment by Dove

2 days ago

I miss perl. I encountered it in school, in 1998, and fell head over heels in love. Used it professionally a lot longer than was probably justified, given the mores and availability of programmers. The Camel Book set my formative opinions on what software should be like, and I'll surely be a perl programmer at heart forever.

I gave it up in 2020, perceiving that python had won. It was a sad day - working in python feels like typing while missing three fingers. I go to reach for an idiom and not only is it not there, I'm told the phantom limb syndrome is for everyone's good, including mine.

I've never found the code of skilled perl programmers difficult to read. I think bad programmers will always write code that is difficult to work with, even in languages that are supposed to prevent it. The most miserable time I ever had understanding someone else's code came at the hands of a brilliant, overly clever, somewhat inexperienced python hacker. I will admit, though, that this feat of confusion required a prodigy, whereas perl makes it quite easy to shoot everyone in a thirty yard radius in the foot. Just the same, I've always thought the messiness of perl was a myth, a result of misuse, abuse, and inexperience. Well written perl conveys much at a glance where in visually cleaner languages, all shapes have the same outline.

But it's also true that by the time I gave it up, I was already looking for a replacement. The language is bold and beautiful and opinionated, and in the fullness of time, some of those opinions proved to be wrong. The world moved forward and perl didn't, and I found myself wanting to do things with objects, and types, and tooling, and functions, and exceptions, that it just didn't do, or didn't do well. Some languages, like PHP and javascript, grew beyond their humble beginnings and bolted on the rigorous and increasingly mandatory machinery of the modern world. Perl didn't.

So my leaving had two big factors: the language didn't grow up, and people didn't want to read my code.

I'm still looking for a replacement. The serious contenders seem to be Go and Ruby, both of which I really like a lot. I dabble in Haskell and Lisp looking for pieces of what I've lost. I have negotiated an uneasy ceasefire with python and javascript out of professional obligation. We can work together, though admittedly neither one of us is entirely happy about it.

Perl was a beautiful thing, a thing I appreciated like art and poetry. I'm glad to have been there for the years in which it flourished. But I also think the world has passed it by. Even looking past hacked in features, it had a more fundamental problem. The tug of war between standardization and expression is like the one between society and the individual. Neither side should ever really win, but perl favored expression more than we now think is wise. We didn't know it then. And the feeling was glorious. But in the decades since, we all - myself included - have decided the balance between those things is ... well we don't know exactly where it is, but we do know it involves less individual freedom than that. The language made a lot of gambles that turned out wrong, but that's the big one.

I think lisp fell prey to that, too, by the way. So formless and expressive that by the time you got done writing your software, you'd essentially invented a language specific to it. Great, in the narrow scope of your project, language and domain fitting hand in glove. Not awesome if you need to hire help. Ads for people who speak Emacs Lisp or Autocad Lisp are telling. You can invent the most beautiful language in the world, but the fact that only three people speak it is surely a strong point against it.

Perl is and was a beautiful thing. I miss it. I seek out its children when I can. I write jokes and references and eulogies where I can, tucking little utility functions stolen from perl into languages where they don't belong, places that never touched that unix heritage. Perl is humble enough to give you the space to do things your way, rather than its way, giving you permission to break all the rules and requesting that you use the freedom with wisdon and goodness and politeness. That sort of bold faith and generosity sparks in me a fierce love. I haven't found it anywhere else. I doubt I will, because as wonderful as it is, it's since been considered unwise. Programming is a social endeavor, and while a specialist language like GLSL can thrive in a little niche, a glue language spoken by only a few people isn't a glue language at all - it's another arcane system that needs to be glued. No, python won. Perhaps it even deserved to.