It’s a blessing because once you are comfortable with a Perl dialect, writing code is very efficient and fun. Perl is very expressive and can also be very concise. It’s a curse, because reading other people’s dialects can be quite difficult.
> reading other people’s dialects can be quite difficult.
That is why we send any code that cannot be read by a fresh CS grad back for rework. It turns out you can solve everything with very basic and straightforward syntax.
By the time I was done writing Perl, my Perl looked a lot like Python.
It's also why I'm not really all that sympathetic to "but $NEWLANG doesn't let me write something that extracts from a hash and then map all the elements with an inline anonymous function, filter the results, and then invoke them all and put the results in a single array all in one line!". I worked for decades, plural, in languages that did permit that, and what I learned is that the more professional the code gets, the less you should be doing that. By the time you've broken it out in a way that won't confuse everyone, giving all the intermediate values professional-quality names and adding a few comments, it turns out the delta between Perl and things like Java or Go or other such "stodgy" languages has closed a lot. Not 100%, by any means, but closer, and in the meantime those stodgier languages have been steadily closing the gap from their end too. In the meantime I get a lot of value from the static guarantees those languages have.
> but $NEWLANG doesn't let me write something that extracts from a hash and then map all the elements with an inline anonymous function, filter the results, and then invoke them all and put the results in a single array all in one line!
>At the Open Source Developers Conference in Melbourne in December 2006, Perl community member Adam Kennedy gave a lightning talk (a short (5 minute) talk for which he didn't have to submit an abstract) on the CPAN Acme::Playmate module, a joke Perl module designed to download the measurements of Playboy magazine Playmates from the Playboy website. (The 'Acme' namespace in Perl is the joke namespace.) During his talk Kennedy showed (twice) a single still photo of a Playboy model.
>Schwartz often comes up in discussions of sexism in open source because of his open enthusiasm for Hooters restaurants, which he mentions frequently in professional contexts.
>[...] In 2001, Randal's company, Stonehenge Consulting, ran a Hooters Wings Promotion at LISA, a sysadmin conference (an example of booth babes).
>"Stonehenge ran a Hooters Wings promotion at the booth at LISA 2001. We gave away 1000 wings in about 45 minutes, with the aid of two Hooters girls Sarah and Lacey."
>notes on: perl lightning talks, impressionistically rendered» Stumbling into the Perl Lightning Talks now. Randal Schwartz (looks like Randal. Certainly wearing Randal-like clothes. He's the Hooter's guy, right? I always get him and Tom Phoenix confused. Okay, definitely Randal.)
>At OSCON, between 2001 and 2009 (several reports during this period, not necessarily every year), Stonehenge Consulting has held parties on one evening of the conference. At these parties, there are usually women present who are not otherwise connected to the conference. They have variously been reported as scantily clad, present to "entertain" the guests, etc. It is unclear whether these women are connected to the venues in which the events are held or are friends of OSCON attendees.
>Michael Schwern, prominent Perl developer and keynote speaker at the National Center for Women & Information Technology's 2013 summit, was arrested in Portland, Oregon on Sept 19, 2013 on two counts of misdemeanor domestic violence charges against his then-spouse Nóirín Plunkett -- specifically, harassment and strangulation.
>The Perl Foundation is fragmenting over Code of Conduct enforcement. "I'm fresh out of ideas with regards to handling toxicity in the Perl community."
>[...] I have personally used and enjoyed the Perl language for nearly 30 years, and it's distressing to see the bigotry and edgelording coming from prominent elements of the community—not to mention the board's failures to respond decisively. The Perl community is not the first to struggle with "culture wars" revolving around a code of conduct, either, which makes it all the more puzzling why its board seems incapable of formulating one.
>This is not tolerated. By Sawyer X on August 31, 2012 10:46 PM under Rant.
>There had been several posts recently about disgusting sexist idiotic behavior on PerlMonks. Most people know my opinion on these issues very well, but I don't think that's good enough. I think we need to actually bring it up and discuss it. I want to thank all the people who wrote about it and specifically Joe McMahon who both spoke of it on blogs.perl.org and on Perlmonks here. No, this is not to be taken lightly. And no, I will not shut up about this. And yes, my post is probably gonna be long. I'm sorry, but I need to put it out there.
