Why I Left Perl

http://www.leancrew.com/all-this/2012/02/why-i-left-perl

by jashkenas • 14 years ago

50 40 14 years ago

rhizome2• 14 years ago

First sentence: "OK, I suppose I really haven’t left Perl"

It's a couple thousand word memoir, about 1/2 comprised of reasons he's not using to "leave Perl," before telling us that it's Perl people who bug him. He needs to get together with that "no semicolons in Javascript" guy in another HN post.

sciurus• 14 years ago

It's the sentiment in the Perl community that some of the language constructs are unsafe and should be avoided that bugs him, not the people themselves.

Natsu• 14 years ago

I guess I don't get what he has against use strict? I've found that it's usually less painful than the alternative.

rhizome2• 14 years ago

I take your point, but I think it's a quibble (or even passive voice) to separate the community from the people who comprise it.

zby2• 14 years ago

There is one thing that I cannot reconcile in my mind. First is the advice to 'make it a story' - I think it really improved my writings. The second is blog posts like this one - what has this whole life-story to do with the point about abrasive on-line pundits?

And actually it is not only blog posts - journalists often do the same thing, but maybe they don't so often write about their own lives.

reuser• 14 years ago

OK, so I love Python.

But you are going to find people in the Python world telling you to abide by PEP8. And saying that you should be using virtualenv. And saying that you should not use (module-level) globals. And saying that you should be using various checking tools. And the checking tools may say annoying things (some of which will be good points about your code).

And I'm kind of one of those people, as well; not saying that there aren't reasons to break a rule, or that it instantly makes your code crap if you do, but I understand these arguments.

And a vocal number of those on Python IRC channels tend to be dicks to newbies or people with unusual ideas.

So I guess I would question whether Python is going to give you what you want. I can't speak much to Ruby's culture.

Use the tools you like which make your life better, and if it makes your life better then ignore other people's unsolicited opinions on the internet and just do your thing.

TylerE2• 14 years ago

Python is much better positioned here, since the default is to be sane.

So the typical question is "I'm trying to do something a bit odd, can I?" vs "Help, that unlabeled lever I bumped into just blew my foot off."

berntb3• 14 years ago

>>Python is much better positioned here, since the default is to be sane.

As opposed to Perl? Are you trolling or can you list a few insane things in e.g. the Perl Best Practices book?

Edit: page 470 of Perl Best Practices (also pg 429 and 431) -- recommends using strict and warnings. It is hardly controversial or insane, it catches bugs.

brcrth• 14 years ago

It's just me or it's really strange that he's "moved" from Perl to Python because he doesn't like the fact that there's a preferred (by some people) way of doing things. Which, again, for some people, it's the "advantage" of Python, where there should be "one true/simple way" of doing things which, AFAIK, is summarized at PEP8.

Edit: grammar correction.

ddelony• 14 years ago

I think every programming language has a preferred way of doing things. Every profession also has a preferred way of doing things. For example, as a professional writer, I can site the AP Stylebook, Strunk & White, the Chicago Manual of Style.

Work doesn't happen in a vacuum, and when you're dealing with other people, some kind of standard is necessary, even if it does seem a little annoying at times.

tomku2• 14 years ago

This doesn't make much sense. If anything, I'd argue that the Perl community is taking a page out of Python's book with their recent emphasis on readable code, best practices and things like "use strict" over the freewheeling hackery that formed Perl's reputation. I'm not sure what I'd recommend to the author if they prefer a less prescriptive community, but it certainly wouldn't be either Python or Ruby. Maybe something from the Lisp family, like Racket?

On a side note, the very things that the author complains about are the same things that have been motivating me to learn Perl recently. My previous experience with it had been exposure to badly-written sysadmin scripts and clever one-liners. However, the stuff I've seen recently (particularly chromatic's "Modern Perl" book [1] and the Enlightened Perl Organisation [2]) has shown me that it's possible to write Perl that's downright elegant, without resorting to the ugly mess that many people think of when they hear "Perl script".

[1] http://www.onyxneon.com/books/modern_perl/index.html

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

wazoox• 14 years ago

If you're interested in serious completely mind-bending hacking, don't forget to check eyepopslikeamosquito [1] posts on perlmonks.org. The golfing adventures (in Perl, Python and Ruby) really read like fantasy tales from another planet of superior brains :)

[1] http://www.perlmonks.org/?node_id=176576

mey• 14 years ago

As an outsider to the perl community, looking in. I see an identity crisis. Is perl a shell scripting language, a web framework to scale, a OO Monolith EE system? Talk to different people you will hear yes. The fact that use strict exists is a flaw in and of itself. It divides a community on the "correct" way to use the language.

As an outsider, I don't have a niche that perl fits, that something else with a clearer purpose doesn't already cover. I appreciate it for it's contributions to language development, but that's about it.

autarch• 14 years ago

Is this any different than Ruby or Python (or any other scripting(ish) language)?

Ruby and Python are both good for sysadmin scripting, web frameworks, and big apps. So is Perl.

The fact that use strict exists is hardly a flaw. It's a useful tool, and one that many of us use most of the time. The fact that is doesn't exist for Ruby or Python seems like the flaw.

But if Python did add it, I wouldn't be surprised to see it default to off for a long time because of backwards compatibility, just like Perl.

btilly4• 14 years ago

I remember when I felt as he does about strict.

I also remember the day that I made a trivial error that strict would have instantly caught, and took out Bloomberg's ftp server as a result. That was also the day that I was converted.

It is important to know what strict does and doesn't do. It is not a panacea. But that said, it is a very good default to have on. But most days it catches problems for me, and they are usually real bugs. Keeping it quiet involves very little work. And my experience seems typical.

I believe him when he says that he has lots of working scripts that don't use it. However I also believe that a habit of using it would improve his productivity. And based on past experience, I'd be willing to bet that if he put strict on those scripts, he'd find and fix at least one real bug. (And probably a lot more.)

Given how useful strict is, why shouldn't it be a default "best practice" that gets recommended? This is not nagging. This is sharing useful information that makes people's life better. I've had people thank me for it.

zby2• 14 years ago

You write that it is not nagging - but you don't really know that guys experience. I can very well imagine some internet pundits nagging him about it.

But yeah - I wrote that only as a devil's advocate :)

__david__• 14 years ago

I have same experiences as you. I can remember arguing with my friend about how inflexible "use strict" made Perl feel--Like it was trying to force C idioms onto a dynamic language (having to define variables, for example). But yeah, after running into bug after bug in my programs I finally saw the light...

The Perl community has pretty clearly collectively decided that "use strict" is the thing to do. I firmly believe the only reason it isn't the default behavior of Perl is because the core community holds backwards compatibility in such high regard.

jlarocco3• 14 years ago

I think part of the point he's making is that it's easier to just use a language where the "safer" option is the default. Then I don't need to worry about it, and I don't have to listen to people repeat the same thing over and over.

And to be honest, people constantly pointing out the same advice over and over gets old. An occasional, "Hey, did you know..." with some new advice is cool, but people have been beating a dead horse with "use strict" and "use warnings". If somebody isn't using strict, it's not because they don't know about it.

btilly4• 14 years ago

I find this statement ironic when the language he moved to is Python, and Python does not offer the direct equivalent of strict. (Though there are external verification tools that do. But it is not built into the language.)

In Perl if I have a typo in my variable names or function calls, it gets flagged by strict vars or subs respectively.

As for people not using strict, someone who is not using strict at this point in Perl either has very good reason (eg Damian Conway) or is sabotaging themselves.

bigiain• 14 years ago

As a long time Perl guy (I had a few websites break when my ISP upgraded from Perl4 and all my email addresses broke with unescaped @ symbols), I think of strict and warnings as being like speed limits. It's a _really_ good idea for inexperienced drivers/perl-programmers to stick to them. Once you've got a bit of experience behind you, you can choose when to ignore that good advice - and just like teenaged boys in cars, mostly people make that choice before they're actually experienced enough to have made a good call, and the near-misses/speeding-tickets/accidents as a result of those poor calls is what ends up becoming the foundations of real experience later on.

I'm firmly of the opinion that telling everybody (especially inexperienced Perl programmers) "you've got to use strict and warnings" is the right approach - with the unstated acknowledgement that if you know what you're doing and are prepared to accept the risks, you'll occasionally choose to ignore that advice.

prg318• 14 years ago

I have met several avid Perl developers in my line of work and at conferences that have been abundantly helpful. IRC users, on the other hand, can be somewhat of a disaster. I was working a script and couldn't find in the documentation of how to set a custom error code with "die". I decided to ask in #perl on freenode, but I was constantly "trolled" with some of the users spamming "Have you considered reading the documentation?". One of these users did in fact answer my question (just use exit), seconds before I was banned. When I pm'd the user who banned me, he explained to me that I had "not answered his question whether I had answered the documentation". Heh.

Ironically, the user that banned me runs a blog whose most recent blog post was regarding "Exit statuses and how $? works". So I guess my question wasn't so stupid after all.

I have heard that #perl on OFTC is slightly more sane and helpful, but can't attest for that personally.

berntb3• 14 years ago

For Perl questions, check perlmonks.org. That is a very helpful, informative and nice website.

petdance• 14 years ago

Your IRC experience is not an uncommon one, unfortunately. Next time, check out #perl-help, which is a bit less hostile.

halayli• 14 years ago

> “All variables must be declared my or our. That you would even consider doing otherwise reveals what a despicable coder you are.”

> This was stupid advice, but it was common. Perl’s defaults were as much a part of the language as regular expressions and were just as useful. I’d written dozens of scripts that relied, for example, on variables springing to life when first referenced, and they’d all been working perfectly for years. It’s not hackwork to take advantage of a language’s documented features.

The point here is not it will break the script but maintaining the script becomes a nightmare. that's why it's a bad practice. Clarity should always be favored over magic in programming.

jrockway• 14 years ago

The good news is, you don't have to type "use strict" anymore; it's the default if you opt to declare Perl 5.11 or higher as the minimum for your module or script.

People seem to hate typing "my" to declare a variable, but that's fine. I appreciate the number of times that's caught bugs for me, and I appreciate the clarity of scoping it allows for. I never really figured out scoping in Python, because you never declare variables. In Python, you could write:

   def foo():
      def reset():
         x = 0
      def inc():
         x += 1
      def print():
         print x

And it would compile, but not be what you mean. In Perl, you'd write:

   sub foo {
       my $reset = sub { my $x; $x = 0 }
       my $inc   = sub { my $x; $x++ }
       ...
   }

and know exactly what's going on because you had to explicitly declare $x. You can instantly tell that the Perl is broken. But the Python looks like it works (but doesn't). That, to me, is a big deal.

Of course, it doesn't actually matter because you're not supposed to program like that in Python. But if you chose to anyway, ...

hythloday2• 14 years ago

Python has pychecker, which will catch that error for you (as I understand it solves the same issues that "use strict" does).

grout• 14 years ago

The only valid reasons to "leave" Perl apply equally to Python. Sorry, but it's true.

Compilers are good enough for type systems to be advantages, now.

Why I Left Perl

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