![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
hirezI've just performed the Internet equivalent of lobbing the paper across the room and muttering 'Bloody charlatans should be bloody horsewhipped. And the Inspiral Carpets.' Only because the laptop's not mine-mine and the Linux box is too heavy to throw comfortably, I just closed the tab and resolved to write a stroppy post somewhere no-one will read it.
Perl, right? Appaz. 'The kids' are getting (back) into it because, I don't know, ZX Spectrums, Vengaboys and brightly coloured foreign shoes. The reason the relevant article was pleased to call a thesis was because when they did dotcom 1.0, Perl had near total market penetration the like of which the PHPythonRubyNodeClojure fanpersons can only envy.
Which is partly true.
When we did dotcom 1.0, Perl5.0.cock was the only game in town and everything else was even worse. Shellscript? I watched some daft bugger try to code up a system in not-even-bash on a xenix box. I wrote some mostly-functional client/server stuff in C.
In the early 90s I did rather a lot of C hacking. I was quite good at it and quite familiar with the inside of the Greymatter catalogue. (Greenleaf comms and FTP TCP/IP libraries most specifically) And, modulo the joy of hunting down obscure pointer bugs, I could probably call it 'fun'.
Fast-forward a bit and we're ankle-deep in O'Reilly,Sun and Cisco books as we try to bootstrap an ISP. Imagine there not being a Google or a superexchange to cut & paste from. (You can't. I mean, I can barely remember how we did it.) But, y'know, we weren't idiots. We knew Livingstone Portmonsters and DHCP was the way forward, rather than whatever-the-hell-it-was that Demon did. And, after a brief and mistaken adventure with a Perl4 package from Sunsite, I got really quite bored with handrolling perl5.
I didn't find Perl coding pleasant. I could do it, because one procedural language is pretty much like any other, and it seemed much more capable than this 'personal home page' macro malarkey that some German kid was playing with, but it was just... Ugh. Everything about it was... Ugh.
However, because time had moved on and we were up to Perl5.2 or 3 or something on Deadrat5 or 6 and everyone around me was all like 'oh eh right perl it's banging and sorted geezer' I assumed that I'd just got old and stupid and I should stick to hating SysV like any other sensible person.
It turns out that actually I'm significantly more productive in Ruby, which was a jolly pleasing discovery to make.
I'm sure Perl's got a place, just as long as it's nowhere near me.
Perl, right? Appaz. 'The kids' are getting (back) into it because, I don't know, ZX Spectrums, Vengaboys and brightly coloured foreign shoes. The reason the relevant article was pleased to call a thesis was because when they did dotcom 1.0, Perl had near total market penetration the like of which the PHPythonRubyNodeClojure fanpersons can only envy.
Which is partly true.
When we did dotcom 1.0, Perl5.0.cock was the only game in town and everything else was even worse. Shellscript? I watched some daft bugger try to code up a system in not-even-bash on a xenix box. I wrote some mostly-functional client/server stuff in C.
In the early 90s I did rather a lot of C hacking. I was quite good at it and quite familiar with the inside of the Greymatter catalogue. (Greenleaf comms and FTP TCP/IP libraries most specifically) And, modulo the joy of hunting down obscure pointer bugs, I could probably call it 'fun'.
Fast-forward a bit and we're ankle-deep in O'Reilly,Sun and Cisco books as we try to bootstrap an ISP. Imagine there not being a Google or a superexchange to cut & paste from. (You can't. I mean, I can barely remember how we did it.) But, y'know, we weren't idiots. We knew Livingstone Portmonsters and DHCP was the way forward, rather than whatever-the-hell-it-was that Demon did. And, after a brief and mistaken adventure with a Perl4 package from Sunsite, I got really quite bored with handrolling perl5.
I didn't find Perl coding pleasant. I could do it, because one procedural language is pretty much like any other, and it seemed much more capable than this 'personal home page' macro malarkey that some German kid was playing with, but it was just... Ugh. Everything about it was... Ugh.
However, because time had moved on and we were up to Perl5.2 or 3 or something on Deadrat5 or 6 and everyone around me was all like 'oh eh right perl it's banging and sorted geezer' I assumed that I'd just got old and stupid and I should stick to hating SysV like any other sensible person.
It turns out that actually I'm significantly more productive in Ruby, which was a jolly pleasing discovery to make.
I'm sure Perl's got a place, just as long as it's nowhere near me.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2015-01-19 08:28 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2015-01-19 05:28 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2015-01-19 05:25 pm (UTC)God yes. I couldn't program without google now. In the old days where I had to try to work out what the hell four screenfulls of g++ STL garbage actually really meant rather than shoving it through google to get the stack overflow page saying "you fucked up the cast numpty"... god, you can't make me go back.