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Perl's decline was cultural

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393 points todsacerdoti | 5 comments | 06 Dec 25 17:42 UTC | HN request time: 0.683s | source
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jordanb ◴[06 Dec 25 18:16 UTC] No.46175337[source]▶
I always found the Perl "community" to be really off-putting with all the monk and wizard nonsense. Then there was the whole one-liner thing that was all about being clever and obscure. Everything about Python came off as being much more serious and normal for a young nerd who wasn't a theater kid.
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lysace ◴[06 Dec 25 18:36 UTC] No.46175513[source]▶
Perl is a sysadmin language. There's "always" been this tension between sysadmins and developers.

In my mind (developer back then) I'd amateur-psychoanalyze all of that nonsense as some kind of inferiority complex meant to preserve the self image. Needless complexity can be a feature!

And now we are all developers!

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1. MrDarcy ◴[06 Dec 25 18:38 UTC] No.46175535[source]▶
In the 2000’s Python was also a sysadmin language.

Edit: But I see your point, Google SRE’s around the late 2000’s reached for Python more than Perl.

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2. lysace ◴[06 Dec 25 18:39 UTC] No.46175539[source]▶
(90s) Yes, but it developed.
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3. oncallthrow ◴[06 Dec 25 19:25 UTC] No.46175916[source]▶
I think Perl is still more popular even today than Python as a sysadmin language. Late 2000s it certainly was. Maybe Google was different, but across the industry more widely Python was barely used, Perl was used everywhere.
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4. lysace ◴[06 Dec 25 19:34 UTC] No.46175985[source]▶
My experience:

Sysadmin-driven companies (typically Sun-based) often used Perl.

Developer-driven companies used other languages running on cheaper X86 Linux.

5. calmbonsai ◴[06 Dec 25 19:55 UTC] No.46176135[source]▶
As someone who lived through that transition, we used Perl extensively to sysadmin ~30 Solaris and Irix workstations and it was superlative at that.

At that time, Guido was still working at CNRI locally to us in Reston, VA and we had several discussions at the local Pyggies (Python User Group) on transitioning over to Python for that work. We were a (mostly) C++/Java shop, but Perl fit into all the other "crevices" beautifully.

Python just didn't have enough library support for all of our "swiss-army chainsaw" demands. Still, it was very apparent at the time it would eventually get there and I was enamored with its "one right way" of doing things--even at the bytecode level.