… Personally, I'm glad we've moved on towards becoming a serious engineering discipline, complete with UX being a thing.
Original discussionWe were wizards – a foreword to Learning Perl (1993)126 source comments · at importBashing Perl is now a meme, but I can never get over what could have been… Python 3000 and Perl 6 had the community all abuzz. CPAN was the amazing Wild West where people were sharing amazing libraries in such a simple way compared to how every other language was still using the likes of Source Forge and possibly even Fresh Meat (GitHub didn’t exist yet). Don’t fall into the meme trap of hating on Perl. Although it’s only now used in a handful of companies run by OGs and possibly by devops, I urge you to take a look and spend a month using it - really using it. .. because it really is a beautiful language and it really makes Stream-of-Conscious programming the norm
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Cowboy Coding is not a language thing, it’s a mentality thing. I’ve seen many beautifully crafted Perl projects. “Perl Best Practice” was a thing
Full originalI'm glad you found a corner of this industry with "serious engineering." It's still the wild west in web development. Today the creators of frameworks chase engagement metrics rather than wizardry, but the end result is the same.
Full original> Perl was rightly bashed because it was the poster child of cowboy coding, which flies in the face of good engineering practices: Understandability, predictability, reproducibility, measurability, safety. That’s the meme, but it’s simply not true. I’m going to use Python as a basis of comparison because that’s the language which, from my perspective at least, seemed to replace Perl. > understandability A lot has been said about sigils but ultimately a language is only as familiar as a developers exposure to it. Python appeared easier to understand for the newbie because it favoured words over expressions but now that Python has matured it’s become just as incomprehensible too. > predictability I’ll be the first to admin that there are a couple of really massive footguns in Perl which are remnants of its evolution as a shell tool. But there’s other aspects to the language which are reall…
Full originalPeople often forget how bad things were in 2000s. A "serious engineering discipline" usually meant Java and "writing a unit test and five lines of docstring for every get/set method". I'd go for wizards and alchemy any day. Even today many of the "serious engineers" of the time still roam the industry and show up for interviews every now and then, completely unable to write code. Some even capture younger souls into this trap, a sad picture.
Full original>I'm glad we've moved on towards becoming a serious engineering discipline To quote the immortal Bender: >> Oh wait, you're serious, let me laugh even harder.
Full originalRespect different perspectives. Share concrete experiences.
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