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Comment by sh1mmer | Hacker News Reader

I heard a lot of moaning about this at OSCON.

I'm going to be blunt. I actively dislike Perl, not Perl developers, but Perl. This is because I believe it not only gives people the rope to hang themselves with but encourages them to do it in 6 different ways.

The problem that I have most though, is the reaction to this silly bit of fun. Instead of proving that Perl is awesome and showing what you can do with it, I mostly heard a lot of griping. I'd really love to see Perl 6 succeed and those guys do something amazing, new and innovative that breaks from the mold that I think of them in. But until they do, I'm not going to listen to their whining.

P.S. Tim is also right there are lot of great things we got from Perl, but that doesn't mean they should be allowed to coast on them forever.

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So you don't like any programming language, then? Because given a programming language, I can definitely write bad code in more than six ways.

(Have you seen the Python that non-programmers write? Holy shit! It's like 1980s Perl, but worse! Almost like bad code has nothing to do with language, and everything to do with programming ability.)

Oh you can write bad code in every language, and I regularly do.

However, some languages make it far easier for you to write bad code and Perl is at the front of the pack.

In my own opinion each programmatic device should be expressed 1 way. Shorthands are not a good long term strategy, because they increase the chances of massively diversified coding styles.

I upvoted you because even though I disagree with what you're saying, there's nothing wrong with your having that opinion nor with your expression of it.

On the other hand, I simply cannot stand to write Python because the One Way to Do It that tends to be provided is rarely the One Way I Want to Do It.

It's okay that some communities and some languages say "There should be one-- and preferably only one --obvious way to do it", though. After all, if I believe "There's more than one way to do it", that applies to languages and communities, too. If a language whose community believes in only one way to do it makes you happy, use it. If you're like me and prefer having many options to express individual pieces of code however feels most appropriate for that specific situation(e.g., expressing a series of transformations on a list as either a list comprehension or a pipeline like series of feeds connecting higher-order functions), use a language that lets you do that. Neither is better for everyone. Nor is the programmer who prefers either type of language any better than the programmer who prefers the other.

  > P.S. Tim is also right there are lot of great things
  > we got from Perl, but that doesn't mean they should
  > be allowed to coast on them forever.

Most of the people that gripe about Perl think that nothing good ever came from it. (At least in my experience)

They ship a new language, compiler and virtual machine next week (Perl 6 Rakudo Star).

Perl 6 doesn't have much to do with Perl 5 except that the same guy created both. Think of Perl 6 as Perl 5's Clojure. Heavily inspired by the original, but a totally new and different language.

(Think of how non-radical PHP 4 -> PHP 5 and Python 2 -> Python 3 were, and how hard it was to get people to switch. Now imagine differences 100x those, and you can start to see Perl 6's relationship with Perl 5. P5 is going to be around for a long time; it's a great language, and people are going to be using and improving it for a while. P6 is a good language too.

They both happen to have the same name, though, which apparently confuses people.)

> Think of how non-radical PHP 4 -> PHP 5 and Python 2 -> Python 3 were, and how hard it was to get people to switch. Now imagine differences 100x those, and you can start to see Perl 6's relationship with Perl 5.

While the radical difference between Perl 6 and Perl 5 might discourage adoption, I wonder if the less radical changes of PHP 4 -> 5 and Python 2 -> 3 may have contributed to their slow adoption. After all, if there is no radical benefit you will receive from switching your code to a backwards-incompatible new version of your language, it can be hard to justify doing so.

P6 is to P5 as VB.NET is to VB. It's the same language but not really.

Shops that got burned on unmaintanable spaghetti Perl 5 10 years ago aren't even going to look at Perl 6.

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