alt Hacker NewsBut I can look at most Python code and be able to understand what it does. With perl, I have to look up so much.
- Why is there a `1;` on a single line in the middle of this file?
- What is `$_`?
- This parallel execution manager doesn't actually seem to define what code needs to run in parallel in any specific way, how does this work?
- What is this BEGIN block at the start of this Perl file? Why is that necessary?
- What's going on with qx, qw, qq?
- What does chomp do when it's just on its own line, with no arguments given to it?
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Yeah, it's true that Perl did not have as a design goal that a complete newcomer should be able to intuitively understand the code without having any prior exposure to the language. There is a little bit of a learning curve, and that was completely expected by Perl's creators. Yes, you have to learn about the idioms above, but they became second-nature. For many of us, the model clicked in our heads and the terseness was worth it. You could express a lot of functionality in very few characters, and if you had invested in learning, it was very quick to grok because common patterns were reduced to familiar abstractions in the language.
And yet, as the industry grew and all sorts of people from all sorts of backgrounds converged in this space, the tolerance and appetite for funky/terse waned in favor of explicit/verbose/accessible. It's probably for the better in the end, but it did feel a little bit like the mom-and-pop store on the corner that had weird pickled things at the register and a meemaw in the back got replaced by a generic Circle K with a lesser soul.
Honestly, $_ and "what does a function do when I don't supply any arguments?" are really nice in Perl, and not that difficult to understand. I think a lot of languages could use a 'default variable'.
To be able to fully comprehend Perl (even without having to embrace it), one needs a fiddle.
Perl and some of Perl's quirks will make more sense once you realise that it is deeply rooted in UNIX command line utilities, UNIX conventions and some UNIX shell defaults, except when it is not, i.e.
- What is `$_`?
- What is this BEGIN block at the start of this Perl file? Why is that necessary?
- What does chomp do when it's just on its own line, with no arguments given to it?
You’re mad that you have to look up what keywords do in a programming language you aren’t familiar with? If you think Python is always clear, I can guarantee you (as someone with relatively expert grasp of Bash, Ruby, Go, and once long ago, Perl) that no, it isn’t always obvious.
Again: python syntax is more akin to what you are used to, and so it feels more comfortable to you.
$_ is inscrutable if you haven't studied perl, but the same thing would happen to anyone who sees a python decorator for the first time. what does "else: do after a while loop in python? Only people who know python know what it does (and I suspect most don't). The different quoting operators are also trivial to learn. In comparison, yield from python is also simple syntax but the semantics are much more involved.
BEGIN? Take 60 seconds to read what it means. And if you knew awk, you'd not have to do that, as it was directly lifted from awk.