Erik Naggum's Perl Rant

http://www.schnada.de/grapt/eriknaggum-perlrant.html

by biot • 12 years ago

8 9 12 years ago

astrange• 12 years ago

My memories of the 90s were that Perl programmers were helpful and got things done, whereas if you asked a Lisp user anything they would tell you 1. you were wrong 2. everyone else is also wrong 3. you need to study another five years before doing anything, or sometimes 4. you should kill yourself.

Hopefully now that we live in the world of the future we can use him as an example of how not to write mailing list posts.

(There were one or two angry Europeans on the ffmpeg list who got things done, but the behavior and getting things done were both seemingly caused by having lots of free time since they were unemployable…)

cjensen• 12 years ago

A good rant should have specific examples for its points. Or maybe even one example for at least one point.

This is not a good rant. It's just a bunch of disparaging assertions.

maxlybbert2• 12 years ago

On the one hand, this rant is 14 years old now, and discusses a version of Perl that is vastly different from what exists today. On the other hand, Perl 14 years ago did have serious problems, as did its competition, and the rant makes some decent points.

For what it's worth, I can do the exercises from SICP ( https://mitpress.mit.edu/sicp/ ) without much difficulty in modern Perl.

logan-campbell2• 12 years ago

Brilliant! Can you please share the code? I'd love to see it.

maxlybbert2• 12 years ago

I haven't done them all, although it might be fun to do so. A big part of the book focuses on closures and passing functions to functions, which are both supported in Perl.

For the time being, Higher Order Perl might satisfy you ( http://hop.perl.plover.com/book/ ). It's only 9 years old now, so it's relatively modern.

AnimalMuppet• 12 years ago

Wow. He can totally rant about how evil Perl is and how good Lisp is (without any data, as cjensen noted), but he can't manage to capitalize the start of his sentences. I'm supposed to take his opinion on which language is good?

jack-r-abbit• 12 years ago

he can't manage to capitalize the start of his sentences

Having no clue who this cat is (well... was) I had to look him up to figure out if I cared about his 14 year old rant against Perl. One thing about him that stuck with me after reading was that he did that on purpose because it was easier to type. But that doesn't really make it better.

logan-campbell2• 12 years ago

I think you've introduced a new type of fallacy into the world.

spdub• 12 years ago

If he had focused on writing english instead of bashing perl, you _might_ have a point.

Erik Naggum's Perl Rant

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