Perl was my first love as a language, and I don't recall any hostility towards Perl users. On the contrary, the environment in the early 2000s was very supportive.
Perl likely declined because Perl6 did a Duke Nukem Forever, and Perl5 was dated and not incredibly well-adapted to OOP. Then Python got taken up for teaching, and it was all over.
(I still love Perl5, still use it in one-liners all the time, and still code up quick CLI tools with it.)
I remember seeing at least one person complain that perl forums were unfriendly, but in that case it turned out it was because he took it as an insult when after he posted code others would comment with re-writes using fewer lines/characters. He didn't understand that they were just playing and not critiquing or trying to tell him that his code should be have been written that way instead. If anything, the shortest possible way to do something should probably be avoided in perl code you plan on ever having to work on again, but it can still be fun to see how compact you can make it.
Yep, that sounds about right. Similarly, people would complain about SO being unfriendly because of people politely asking them to isolate a problem and produce a proper minimal reproducible example, or seeking clarification for a how-to question about what should happen in an edge case, or questioning whether the OP has an XY problem, or marking an obviously duplicate question as a duplicate, or just generally explaining that there are standards on the site and that you can't just treat it as a help desk.
Perl was my first love as a language, and I don't recall any hostility towards Perl users. On the contrary, the environment in the early 2000s was very supportive.
Perl likely declined because Perl6 did a Duke Nukem Forever, and Perl5 was dated and not incredibly well-adapted to OOP. Then Python got taken up for teaching, and it was all over.
(I still love Perl5, still use it in one-liners all the time, and still code up quick CLI tools with it.)
How so? I stopped hanging around in Perl-land around 2001 and it seemed friendly enough way back then. What happened to it?
I remember seeing at least one person complain that perl forums were unfriendly, but in that case it turned out it was because he took it as an insult when after he posted code others would comment with re-writes using fewer lines/characters. He didn't understand that they were just playing and not critiquing or trying to tell him that his code should be have been written that way instead. If anything, the shortest possible way to do something should probably be avoided in perl code you plan on ever having to work on again, but it can still be fun to see how compact you can make it.
Yep, that sounds about right. Similarly, people would complain about SO being unfriendly because of people politely asking them to isolate a problem and produce a proper minimal reproducible example, or seeking clarification for a how-to question about what should happen in an edge case, or questioning whether the OP has an XY problem, or marking an obviously duplicate question as a duplicate, or just generally explaining that there are standards on the site and that you can't just treat it as a help desk.