Why Programmers Are Less Humble Now – Blame the Death of Perl
▼ Summary
– Perl was widely used around the turn of the millennium, powering websites and bioinformatics, with major companies like Amazon and Google relying on it.
– Perl’s messy, flexible nature earned it nicknames like the “duct tape of the internet,” with its “write-only” reputation making code hard to read.
– The language’s design philosophy, “There’s More Than One Way to Do It,” intentionally embraces multiple syntax options, reflecting its creator’s linguistic background.
– Larry Wall, Perl’s creator, viewed language evolution as organic, valuing flexibility and rejecting strict purity, much like natural languages.
– Perl’s popularity declined over time, with many programmers preferring cleaner alternatives like Python due to Perl’s perceived bloat and complexity.
Perl once dominated the programming world, powering everything from major websites to complex bioinformatics projects. Companies like Amazon, Google, and Craigslist relied on its text-processing capabilities, making it the backbone of early internet infrastructure. Yet despite its widespread adoption, Perl was always an unconventional choice, a language celebrated for its flexibility but notorious for its chaotic syntax.
Known as the “duct tape of the internet,” Perl embraced a philosophy summed up by its motto: “There’s More Than One Way to Do It.” This approach allowed programmers to solve problems in wildly different styles, from traditional `if` statements to backward-written conditionals or even cryptic ternary operators. The result? Code that often became unreadable, sometimes even to the person who wrote it the day before.
The language’s creator, Larry Wall, brought a linguist’s perspective to programming. Trained in rare languages and missionary work, Wall saw programming as an evolving, organic process rather than a rigid system. He rejected the idea of linguistic purity, drawing parallels between Perl’s eclectic syntax and English’s messy, borrowed vocabulary. To him, a language should be an “amoral artistic medium,” free from dogma, whether in poetry or scripting.
Yet Perl’s very flexibility may have contributed to its decline. As newer languages like Python emerged with cleaner, more structured syntax, many developers abandoned Perl’s creative chaos for readability and consistency. By the late 1990s, whispers of its “bloat” hinted at a shift toward simpler alternatives. Today, while Perl still has niche applications, its golden age has passed, leaving behind a legacy of both admiration and frustration.
For programmers who lived through Perl’s peak, its decline marks more than just a shift in tools. It represents a cultural change, from an era where coding was seen as an art form to one where standardization often takes precedence. Whether that’s progress or loss depends on who you ask.
(Source: Wired)