One person’s tool is another person’s livelihood, the corner stone of their professional experience, and the basis by which other people will (apparently) judge their technical expertise
The comment that upset you made a joke about their code and the tools from the late 90s. It seems you took it as a personal insult as if they were directly talking to you or about your code. It is a really odd thing over which you to get defensive. I have no horse in this race and I would never judge anyone’s expertise solely on the tools they use (given that it might not even be their choice). But between the two of you one made a very dry joke and the other got defensive for no reason when the conversation wasn’t about them.
The tools we use don’t define us. If you feel they do, please reevaluate. Perl (C, k8s, PHP, Python 2.x) are just tools. It’s like defining your identity by the brand of hammer you use.
>The tools we use don’t define us. If you feel they do, please reevaluate. Perl (C, k8s, PHP, Python 2.x) are just tools. It’s like defining your identity by the brand of hammer you use.
Maybe they shouldn't but professionally they actually do. Try to get a job using a tool you love but doesn't have widespread adoption and it's hard. X years experience using tool Y? Better have got on board earlier. Adopt something early that really takes off while you write key libraries, docs, contribute (previous times o'reilly howto books) and it can make your career.
As a class we get awfully groupthink and boosterist of our tech choices. It's not good but it's completely understandable.
Hammers are completely fungible. Two similar languages used in similar places are not. See Perl and Python. Do you really have no preference seeing jobs that specify one or the other? If so that's great - I try to be thereabouts myself too. But it's clearly not the norm and it's not as irrational as you're making out here for all I dislike it.
edit: Trying to phrase this in a pithy fashion below.
It makes zero difference to you as a carpenter if every other carpenter on earth hates your chosen brand of hammer.
It makes a world of difference to you as a programmer if your language of choice is popular or not.
I have been on both sides of hiring decisions a lot. Here's what I can tell you: a developer who has a shit load of Perl experience will be more likely to get a job at a Python shop if they show flexibility in their choices. A Python developer who bashes Perl for being a shitty terrible language will not simply because having a bad attitude is a red flag.
If you have only worked with PHP 4 for the past 20 years and have no plans to move off that language then yeah you will have a harder time. But getting defensive about it in an online discussion is a weird thing to do and honestly a red flag more than anything. The tools may define you as a professional (to some), but not as a person. Getting defensive is a personal thing. If you do it as a professional that's pretty bad. If you take professional discussions personally, in my experience you'll be very difficult as a coworker.
I write software for Apple systems. It’s modern, high-quality code, but it’s for Apple.
There are people that have never met me, and have never had any prior interactions with me, that hate (and that’s not hyperbole) me; simply because of that one fact.
I’m constantly reading stuff about Apple, and people that use/like/support/develop for Apple, that is intentionally insulting and demeaning.
I should know better, and wish you nothing but the best. Perl is a language easy to learn, and difficult to master.
> I write software for Apple systems. It’s modern, high-quality code, but it’s for Apple.
There are people that have never met me, and have never had any prior interactions with me, that hate (and that’s not hyperbole) me; simply because of that one fact.
I'm fascinated to hear this. I quite dislike Apple quite a bit as a company/entity, for a variety of pragmatic and philosophical reasons, but the idea that that would extend to their employees (let alone those working on their platform) is wild to me.
There's lots of folks with axes to grind, that are excellent spinners, and lots of people that are maybe...a bit insecure, shall we say, that eat that spin, and turn it into venom.
The old "Ford vs. Chevy" spat can get like that. People kill each other over which football teams they like.
It's easy to see why folks don't like Apple; just as it's easy to see why folks don't like every other platform.
It's just that there's a lot of really unbalanced folks out there, and even more folks who like to set those people off.
Deeply evolved back from when splitting into group A and group B could be followed by war breaking out and one lot killing the other. Thankfully these days it's more flamewars than sticks and stones.
It started around two decades ago, but I would say the "use strict if at all possible or you're doing it wrong" consensus was reached at least as long ago as 2005, being conservative. Because backwards compatibility was always seen as paramount, it never became default, but if you opted into new version features by version number[1], those advanced to enabled both new features and to turn off or warn on use of what were considered problematic features in the code. For example, a "use v5.10;" pragma would warn indirect method syntax with the assumption you never wanted that (so any new Foo("arg"); would error, so people would use Foo->new("arg"); as the sane agreed upon way it should be done), and would disable bareword filehandles (so you would need to assign them to a scalar like $FH instead of FH).
use v5.12 and later also automatically enabled strict. Perl 5.10 was released in late 2007, and 5.12 in 2010, so there was enough consensus over a decade ago to add it as the default for anyone opting into the bundle of all newer Perl features.
Thanks for that answer, very interesting to know as someone who feels like they got into perl pretty late in the game. I do appreciate it where it works for sure.
I could definitely picture programming in perl in the 90s before people commonly implemented use strict; being a complete hellscape though
Yes, and it was exacerbated by mod_perl in Apache basically working by taking a Perl script/CGI and using eval to turn it into a sub, meaning any subs defined in that script (and not a module it included) to accidentally create closures easily, which really played havoc, and so people adopted... interesting workarounds[1], all in the name of performance.
> the basis by which other people will (apparently) judge their technical expertise
You lost me here. Even if someone thinks that Perl is an unholy abomination to work with, it doesn't follow that those with expertise in it are less skilled. If anything, it seems like it implies the opposite: expertise in it is harder. The counterpart would be something like claiming that Python is a toy language, simple to use but not suitable for Real Work. This claim is the exact opposite as the Perl complaint, and it seems like _that_ would imply negative things about expertise in the language.
I cut my teeth on stuff that would have a lot of folks 'round these parts, crouching under their Uplifts, clutching their teddy-bears, peeing their pants, sucking their thumbs, and sobbing. I started off doing Machine Code and embedded stuff, back when that was still fairly new.
I am very happy to use a nice, safe, memory-avoiding, strongly-typed language like Swift as my principal language, and on a GUI system.
I don't particularly care whether or not some rando on teh Internets tubes thinks I'm a "wuss."
I doubt it. I looked them up (because I care about people, and don't actually want to hurt them), and it seems that Perl is a big part of their repertoire. Perl means a lot to them, and my flippant comment was probably taken as "calling their baby ugly."
So, @peteretep, you have my sincere apology. It was a flippant remark. At the time I wrote it (mid-1990s), Perl was the best way to write portable CGI code. I took the time to learn it, and got fairly good at it.
Since then, I have found my muse in other languages, but I sincerely did not want to give offense. I doubt that deleting the comment would help.
Some of us are veterans of the time when Perl was evangelized as the cure for everything, and the only way to sensibly think about unix programming. That led to the usual over-reaction from Perl critics and it became usual to make sharper comments about it even when you'd never used Perl.
Which all goes to show people clot up into tribes over any silly thing; and that its better not to wrap your identity too much around your tools.
Why does it feel like HN has become so incredibly sensitive? I have been reading comments here a while (13 years I think), and noticed that in the past couple of years is when critical of any piece of software, no matter how warranted or how tongue in cheek, results in comments like this. How would you have phrased the original sentiment that you wouldn’t think was nasty?
Like someone else said, 'don't take attacks on a tool you like as an attack on you.' I think theirs is the overly-sensitive reply. Why get worked up because someone doesn't like software that you do like? Bizarre.
Are you interpreting chrisseaton's comment as being in response to the original comment denigrating Perl? It seems more like it's a response to the defensive comment from petereps
Nah. Wasn't edited, but it was definitely a slap at me, personally. I touched a nerve, and was reprimanded. It was not a "fun" response, and it made me realize that I had caused offense.
Teh Internets tubes are a difficult landscape to navigate. It's almost impossible to write stuff without causing some offense.
Some folks take that as an admonition to never write anything fun. Others (like me) learn to apologize.
I'm fairly good at apologizing, as I need to do it so often. Each time, I learn to ameliorate my approach.
Just for another perspective- I read it as peter intended, a deadpan way of purposefully taking your statement literally, that you wrote code that made you scream, it wasn't Perl's fault.
I found it hilarious, but I'm a weird guy. I just can see where he is coming from where he meant it as a snide joke, not a personal attack.
This whole thread feels like a glorious exercise of Poe's Law.
I can't tell what's what, but man is it funny, to me it reads as deadpan humor by peterep with no insult intended, but obviously others read it differently.
Perspective is amazing and this has made my day from all the smiles and laughs XD
Yeah, it's weird. Even aside from different perspectives, we still get to choose how to interpret and react. "Don't take it personally" is a good way to go through life, in general.
you really make life way too hard for yourself?
why the heck would u care if random stranger is offended over a simple joke regarding a programming language?
waste of energy man
Some people are not well socialised and just like to insult programming languages, and by extension, judge and put down their users. We should extend pity to them. Or perhaps detached bemusement as in https://youtu.be/R00JE6QRbno?t=8546
Yes it is. If you write a COBOL program you're writing legacy code. Contrary to what you might think about Perl it's quickly approaching the same fate.
EDIT: verb tense changed