Perl: 37 years old
Python: 34 years old
@siracusa I’m delighted that you’re stanning for a nearly 40 year old language. Not surprising, but still delightful.
@siracusa Welllll... Perl 5 in 1994 and Python 3 in 2008? 🤷♂️
@siracusa Yes, but Perl was already 20 years old when Larry Wall created it.
@siracusa Perl/Python = Colin Robinson/Baby Colin Robinson
@siracusa Both Perl and Python are closer on the geologic fossil record to COBOL (66 years old) than to our present day.
@siracusa as someone who’s perpetually 27 this doesn’t sit well with me
@siracusa To be fair, Perl came preloaded with technical debt of the sort it’d normally take years to accrue
@siracusa Why would you hire a code(r) over 30 PLSSS...
@siracusa Which you must have at least 107 years experience in.
EXCEPT: a lot of Perl modules haven’t been updated in over a decade, but Python is still under very active development.
#Maintenance #Security
@siracusa While this is true, Python as it exists today is newer, and most developers are using packages and constructs that are a lot newer than 34 years old (numpy, pandas, pytorch). Perl wasted a lot of time inventing a completely different language, which was a dead end. Perl was great for writing quick and dirty scripts for simple text processing tasks, but horrible and unmaintainable for anything large.
Well, it’s kinda like when a 37-year-old dates at 34 year-old. Totally different generations.
@siracusa Inhave a strong feeling AI tools will continue to be “good demos” that are less useful once users ask for things that are actually difficult.
@siracusa Reducto ad absurdub:
Rewrite code from an old language like Perl to a new language like Brainfuck (1993).
@siracusa It is perl's own fault. don't blame python and others
@siracusa for some reason this gives my Lysa Tully breastfeeding Robin Arryn feelings. What are you doing still breastfeeding Python and calling him your baby boy? Everyone else seeing this creepy vibe at the moon door???
@siracusa Literally every sentence in that paragraph ends with "he said"; so, beyond the questionable use of the phrase "a new one like Python", can we assume that it's either an AI -written article or one written by a child?
@siracusa I am a perl programmer at heart and take my revenge on python by using it wrong. F*ck this "pythonic" truth-is-beauty shit. I'll code as dense and cryptic as I damn well want.
@siracusa Never mind Perl vs. Python, we still are arguing about vi vs. emacs.
@siracusa I just came to leave some Pearl poetry here:
Require(AirGuitar);
if($this eq "real life" | "just fantasy"){ $caught = $in{'a-landslide'}; $no = "\from reality"; }
open (YOUR, "$eyes"); $look++ => "the skies" && "c"; $money = 0; $sympathy=0; while ($i, $come, $i, $go){ $i = "easy" } $little++; $little--; if ($wind = "blows") { !$matter => me }
@siracusa Not to be overly pedantic but didn't Perl 6 get renamed, so I think _technically_ "perl" refers to Perl 5, which is really quite long in the tooth? But yeah, it is kind of a silly juxtaposition, and I'm also saying this as someone who was still maintaining a large and critical code base that was all written in Python 2.7 at my last job. I can't imagine I'm the only engineer on earth with that problem.
@siracusa clearly the cutoff for "old" is 35 or 36. This rewrite will buy a year or two before the next one needs to happen.
@siracusa I always thought it was noticeable how Perl programmers are like "Python is cool, we just prefer Perl," while Python programmers always make a point of bashing Perl. Honestly, I think a lot of Perl bashing boils down to people not liking the "$" sigil. I think the concepts the code represents are quite elegant.
Edited 16d ago
@siracusa some languages age faster than others 😉
@siracusa In fairness, anything you write in perl is incomprehensible the next day.
@siracusa to be fair, this is how I will always view Python 🐍 still feels like yesterday it arrived 😅
I detest languages using too many symbols instead of words.
Like __something__ and => and ocr{@{$-[$@++]}
Plus, the amount of white space should never carry any meaning.
@siracusa there is so much of this dumb fuckery happening in the industry. Everyone is transpiling shit to javascript. Not like bytecode...but full-on shitty javascript. Or python, which isn't as shitty.
@siracusa
still, somehow, Common Lisp feels more modern than both of them
@siracusa Let's rewrite in a modern language then, such as Java. It just turned 30 last month, shall we?
Alternative explanation, the author started coding with Perl so python seems much newer.
I mean for me articles published in the early 1990's are ancient history, but those in early 2000's are new, which coincides with when I got my PhD and started my postdoc.
@siracusa Brainfuck: 32 years old, so I’m rewriting my Python into that
@siracusa should focus on porting to cutting edge languages and environments like ColdFusion (tm)
@siracusa Presumably the author of this article was 35 or 36 years old.
@siracusa I was thinking of you as I read that passage (with much the same energy).
@siracusa Ah, but Python's complete lack of concern for backwards compatibility means you never see old Python around. :-/
@siracusa I saw this in the money stuff column and I said to myself “bless your heart”
@siracusa Yet, most of us think that Perl is closer to death than Python. One’s perception of age is affected by many things.
