Comment by bsder | Hacker News Reader

Comment by bsder | Hacker News Reader

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Let me drag this to something concrete: if you are interviewing, it is almost impossible to pass an amateur "Perl screen".

Every single person who doesn't use Perl every day, professionally knows a different subset of Perl. This is one of the few times where being more knowledgeable than the interviewer is also a problem. You will write something, and the interviewer will question you on it because he has never seen it.

I finally solved this problem by bringing one of my personal programs written in Perl and also rewritten in Python so we could talk about it. Now, the interviewer is in MY subset of Perl AND can't argue because I have working Perl code in front of him. This was back in the 1990's when everybody in VLSI design expected you to know Perl.

Because of this "different subset" issue, if you want to maintain a Perl script, you have to basically know the entire language. This is what makes maintaining Perl scripts so difficult.

This "different subset" problem is the whole reason I left the Perl ecosystem back in 1996(!) at the height of Perl's popularity and never looked back.

> This is one of the few times where being more knowledgeable than the interviewer is also a problem

I have actually found that is pretty much always a problem. If you pull out something the interviewer is unfamiliar with they will often assume you are full of it. I have had such people refuse perfectly good explanations for things they haven't heard of because they assume incompetence before that possibility.

That's a sign of a bad interviewer and thus also an indicator of potential bad management.

I'd take those experiences as a blessing rather than a curse.

Indeed. I've "failed" interview screens because the reviewer's Python installation was broken, and rather than reading the traceback and realizing this, they just assumed the candidate's code was broken.

Last I knew, that position was still open almost a year after the fact.

As an experienced Perl programmer, what's your opinion of Raku? Is it a worthwhile replacement or too little too late?

> As an experienced Perl programmer, what's your opinion of Raku?

Perl5 still works fine, and is maintained.

> Is it a worthwhile replacement or too little too late?

False dichotomy - see above.

It's been too little too late for many years, while it was still named Perl 5 for so long.

Raku is the new name for Perl 6, not Perl 5.

> back in the 1990's ... everybody in VLSI design expected you to know Perl.

Has this changed at all?

Dunno. I finally left VLSI design because it was effectively a career dead end. Sense a trend? :)

While I still regard myself as a vastly better VLSI designer than programmer, my ability to wrangle software the whole way from assembly language on a chip to just shy of the top of a full web stack pays far better than my ability to wrangle transistors. And, in my opinion, attacks far more interesting problems.

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