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Underrated Articles on Dev.to from Last Week

Manpreet virk on March 09, 2021

Hello! I'm back with another installment of underrated articles from last week! 😋 Let's check them out 🔥 - 1. Recommended Books 📖 for Be...

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Yuki Kimoto • Mar 9 '21

Perl has been undervalued and I'm looking forward to seeing a list of articles like this one day.

Yuki Kimoto • Mar 9 '21

One reason is excessive and misleading advertising.

In Japan, For example.

Media post Python is loved and Perl is hated on the top of power.

On the other hand, I'm Perl contributor. They have never come to ask me in the last decade.

brandon_wallace • Mar 9 '21

Thanks Manpreet for posting this. These are great articles that I did not even know about. If I had seen them I would have clicked on each one of them to read more. With this post you are giving them more visibility.

Manpreet virk • Mar 10 '21

Thanks for your appreciation Brandon😊

Pavel Gurkov • Mar 9 '21

Too many sigils.

Yuki Kimoto • Mar 9 '21 • Edited

I wonder if general people(not you) speak lookism at first impression.

Perl is actually a very well-balanced programming language.

Pavel Gurkov • Mar 10 '21

They actually do. I mean, lots of people would say “PARENS!” when asked about Lisp.

Don’t get me wrong, Perl is great, and I work with it every day. But it has some serious inherent and momentum problems.

Yuki Kimoto • Mar 11 '21

Pavel Gurkov

Would you stop saying "serious inherent and momentum"?.

If that is not fact, the words do harm Perl.

I think what we need is not be anxious and be brave.

Yuki Kimoto • Mar 11 '21

Thank you for your comment.

Would you stop saying "serious inherent and momentum problems".

If it is not fact, the words themself do harm Perl.

What we need is that "Don't be afraid and be brave".

Pavel Gurkov • Mar 11 '21

It seems you're talking about some Perl crusade. I'm not afraid, thank you, but frankly, I don't really care what happens with Perl (and I'm talking about Perl 5/7). I'm sorry that you hear it as a Perl contributor.

Come on, first - words can't harm Perl. "There are two types of programming languages, ones that no one uses and ones people complain about" - that's B. Stroustrup. Second, if you're saying "stop saying it has problems", if you deny it, you can never think of those objectively and critically, which is imperative for improvement. Third, PHP did a lot more harm to Perl, in terms of popularity, than any words.

OK, if you want it, these aren't facts, these are my opinions. It just happens that a lot of people share those.

Perl is highly dynamic. So much that it has Lisp problem: how many different Object Programming systems you know for Perl? Some of them resemble CLOS, btw. This is not a coincedence.
Then, the evaluation result depends on the LVALUE type. This is nuts to me, very hard to see and hard to debug.
Then, due to the fact the syntax can be changed, and the object system can be changed, and almost ANYTHING can be changed - forget about parsing Perl without Perl, or running static analyzers or some other modern stuff.
And you have to apply strict coding practices for a large codebase to be readable. Or you'll get a funny-looking mess making the same thing happen in 10 different ways.