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Comment by daemonburrito | Hacker News Reader

This is just a personal opinion, but I also wrote Perl (back in the 90s), and I think that TIMTOWTDI was the reason that it fell out of favor.

TIMTOWTDI makes it hard to share code, even between masters. I believe it's the source of the "Perl is unreadable" meme. Because everyone is capable of defining their own personal dialect of Perl, no solid, common subset emerged.

Compare with the Zen of Python: "There should be one – and preferably only one – obvious way to do it." In Python, it's generally very easy for two similarly-skilled Python hackers to share code.

It looks like a Wikipedia editor shares this view: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/There%27s_more_than_one_way_to_...

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> no solid, common subset emerged

That's wrong. This common subset converged through consensus and finds expression in e.g. the Modern Perl movement, the module collection Task::Kensho and the updated motto "There is more than one way to do it, but sometimes consistency is not a bad thing either".

All of those things emerged long after Perl had ceded its position in the language marketplace. It's great that Perl has them now, but the process of working them out took a loooong time.

Isn't that the case with every New Jersey language?

ruby flourished while perl was going down, even though it also shares TIMTOWTDI.

Ruby flourished largely due to rails which ends up being pretty opinionated about how to do things.

Yup. Which is why I'm personally a bit uneasy about Ruby's long-term future. It's attractive for the same reasons that Perl was attractive, but that means it also invites some of the same issues that Perl experienced.

Wild speculation follows:

There's always a need for a solid "just get shit done" language, but maybe any good language in this space is doomed to die by its own success. Crufty, hard to maintain code accumulates over time, because quickly banging out code you don't expect to still be maintaining in 10 years is the whole point. As that cruft accumulates, people start noticing it and inevitably blame the language. That leads to casting about for the next "just get shit done" language, and the cycle repeats.

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