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Perl's decline was cultural

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393 points todsacerdoti | 1 comments | 06 Dec 25 17:42 UTC | HN request time: 0.199s | 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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1. ahartmetz ◴[06 Dec 25 21:53 UTC] No.46176895[source]▶
I've always found Perl just plain ugly, too clever about some things (like iterating over regex matches on stdin or something) and really dumb about other things (variable syntax, the god-awful OOP system). Python is clean and pretty in comparison and usually well thought out. If the communities were reversed, I'd still prefer Python: I just read the documentation in 99% of cases, I very rarely need to interact with the community. Python, as the article says, is mostly not a language for fans - it's mostly for auxiliary tasks.