Programmers Aren’t So Humble Anymore—Maybe Because Nobody Codes in Perl
Perl was once everywhere. Or at least it was in this way. Around the millennial turning point, it seemed that almost all websites were built at the back of this script language. He treated massive quantities of text – mechanisms to do so powerfully and easily were part of the language – and it was even used in bioinformatics, moving and disseminating genetic data. Based on a single list, companies that used Perl widely varied: Amazon, Google, Yahoo, Deutsche Bank, Akamai, Citibank, Comcast, Morgan Stanley, Mozilla. Many Craigslist has been scheduled in Perl.
Even in its maximum use, the popularity of Perl has always been a little surprising. Perl is an undeniably disorderly language. It is often called “Internet adhesive tape”, with joking programmers that it is a language “only in writing”: you write there but read it rarely (at least successfully).
There is a nature of mashup amalgamated in Perl, all at the service of his motto: “There is more than one way of doing it.” Just as there are synonyms in English, Perl has a variety of approaches to write the same thing. Although it is a common characteristic of the programming languages to a certain extent, Perl seems to want to reverse you with. There are several ways, for example, to write conditional declarations, from the use of traditional “SI” to “unless”; to write an IF declaration back in a single line; Even to an operator in three parts which involves a question mark and a colon. I have a separate memory, in the early 2000s, to write code to Perl one day, and the next day did not understand what I had written.
But this congestion and the baroque structure are in fact intentional and are part of the broader philosophy that underlies Perl. The creator of the language, Larry Wall, was trained in linguistics, and his intention was to become, with his wife, a missionary involved in rare languages. Wall ended up taking a different path and a fully adopted coding. But his deep thoughts on the functioning of languages have never left him.
Wall’s prospect seemed to be that an obsession with linguistic purity was overfeed. English has French, Greek, German and even Akkadian words, betraying its winding history and multiple origins. We divide our infinitives and throw the laying of our modifiers. We have puns, both planned and not. So what is a bit of strangeness when it comes to knowing how to write an If? The evolution targeted by wall as part of the language development process. There is an organic process in progress here, and end products do not need to be ordered. And so, a wide approach and without judgment – the construction of the language is vital, whether it is a language designed to write scripts or sonnets.
Perl has his “more in a way” to do things and English has its many flexible styles and nature, a nature that can contain everything, from cooking recipes to haikus, racing lists in Faulkner. It is a sign of something that is really open. As Wall said once: “I am firmly believing that a language … should be an amoral artistic medium.” If Perl has a global vision or dogma, it is simply the fact that, perhaps, there should not be a Dogme programming at all.
To be clear, I have never been a deep user of Perl. His syntax and his disorder overwhelmed his power for me, and when I was initiated into the well -ordered structure of Python, I ran to this language and I never really looked back. This could actually be a clue to the reason why the language has lost its brilliance. Even in 1998, at its peak, there were suggestions that Perl’s bloating could lead to a desire to jump to something “cleaner”. Whatever reason, Perl is no longer as popular as they are.
