[canvascritic]

I'll be frank: I think this idea that ${faveLang} is for misunderstood geniuses who truly understand computers where mainstream languages like Python are for dunces who only know how to glue together APIs is a large part of why such languages as Perl are nearing extinction. It turns out that there are people working on challenging problems in domains you've never heard of in Python -- and pretty much every other language. Give it a rest

In the real world, the ability of a lone genius to cobble together a script in an hour is actually not that much of an edge -- it is more important for people to write something that others can understand and maintain. If you can do that in Perl, great, and if writing Perl makes you happy: also great. But beware that smug elitism turns people off, it kills communities and also tends to signal a pathological inversion of priorities. All this should be in service to people, after all

[cjbgkagh]

I wonder how much of catering to the lowest common denominator / being a team player is an internalizing of corporatisms reduction of the worker to a fungible interchangeable cog.

As a solo dev it is a massive advantage to use sophisticated languages and tools without worrying if the dumbest person on my team can use them. It’s a strategic advantage and I run rings around far larger companies.

[canvascritic]

I agree with you that it is sad there isn't more diversity in languages and tools, and that generally organizations are using the same terrible slop. We could have such nice things

You lose me with the smugness. Make no mistake, you aren't smarter or better than someone else purely by virtue of your willingness to hack on BEAM languages or smlnj or Racket or whatever languages you like. There are probably people smarter than you working in sales at $bigcorp or writing C# on Windows Server 2008 at your local utility. Novice programmers often have an instinct to rewrite systems from scratch when they should be learning how to read and understand code others have written. Similarly, I associate smugness of this form with low capacity for navigating constraints that tend to arise when solving difficult problems in the real world. The real world isn't ideal, sorry to say

[throwaway2037]

    > reduction of the worker to a fungible interchangeable cog

I see this trope a lot on HN, and I don't understand it. All of the highest skilled developers that I have met are the quickest to adapt to new projects or technologies. To me, they look like a "fungible interchangeable cog".

And every solo dev that I ever met thinks they are God's gift to the world -- "tech geniuses". Most of them are just working on their own Big Ball o' Mud, just like the rest of us working on a team.

[kamaal]

>>In the real world, the ability of a lone genius to cobble together a script in an hour is actually not that much of an edge

Any macro/multiplier is that way. You don't miss it, until some one shows you how to do it.

In the last six months alone the scenarios where I had to call upon Perl to help slam dunk a thing insanely laborious are dozens in number.

Its just that if you don't know this, or don't know it exists, you grow up being comfortable doing manual work with comfort.

Sheer amount of times, I have seen some one spend like half a day doing things which can be done using a vim macro in like seconds is beyond counting at this point.

[stouset]

The superpower here is a scripting language, not Perl specifically.

[canvascritic]

You are missing my point. For transparency, you are talking to someone who writes Racket in emacs on my Linux desktop, has used Rust macros to clean up awful code in widely used open source packages, and regularly generates code for all manner of purposes in lots of different languages. I know the slam dunk feeling of generating exactly the code that will topple a problem -- and I also know it's not actually that big an edge!

It matters little that you can generate code in an hour that would take your colleague days. It is nice for you and it provides a short lift for your team, but in the limit what matters is maintainability. Peter Hintjens writes fondly of metaprogramming and code generation, but also warns that it makes it difficult for others to work with you, and it's easy to fall into the trap of building abstractions for their own sake. The "edge" in technical work comes from seeing both the forest and the trees, and missing that technical work is in service of humans, first and foremost.

I am glad you enjoy writing Perl, and I like encountering people passionate about it in my work. But I still think there are good reasons why it's in decline, and Perl users should reflect more on that rather than assuming people aren't using it because they are dumb / not technical enough / don't think about problems as creatively or deeply.

[akira2501]

> who only know how to glue together APIs

I think there's a deeper truth here. Perl was notoriously difficult to make C language extensions for. Languages like Ruby and Python really took off because they had a much more approachable and useful C interpreter API which; honestly, made gluing various library APIs into the language far easier. This being the key to taking a very slow and memory hungry scripting language covering a fraction of POSIX into a useful domain extension and embedded language.

Ruby did better at the domain extension part and Python was better at the embedded language part. Perl 6 went entirely the other way. I think this was the real driver of popularity at the time. This also explains why gem and pip are so different and why pip never matured into the type of product that npm is.

[RandalSchwartz]

Inline::C did a good job of reducing the barrier to entry for C code.

[throwaway2037]

    > beware that smug elitism turns people off

I don't know what caused this reaction. Was the OP being smug or elite? I did not read it that way. If anything, in my experience, C++ and Rust folks are way more smug/elite compared to Perl hackers.

In my experience, the biggest problem with Perl is readability. Python crushes it. Without list comprehension, it is also very slow during for loops. But, no worries: Most people writing Python don't care too much about speed, or they are using C libraries, like NumPy or Pandas or SciPy. I write this as someone who wrote Perl for years, personally and professionally. Later in my career, I came into Python, and realised it was so much easier to read and maintain large code bases, compared to Perl. To be fair, much like C, it is possible to write very clear Perl, but people quickly get carried away, using insane syntax. With Python, the whole culture, from the bottom up, is about readability, simplicity, and accessibility. I think my only "gripe" about Python is there are no references like Perl, but you can fake it with single-item-lists.

[michaelt]

> I don't know what caused this reaction.

Probably the lines "Its just that the culture in Python world isn't made up of people who think about those problems or even in that dimension."

and "Most of the bad rep Perl gets is because programmers who only interact with http endpoints and databases tend to not understand where else it could be useful."