2026-10-14 13:37 UTC
To explain what I mean by this: for a long time the Perl community took great pride in how difficult and terse the language was. The old joke that well-written perl was indistinguishable from line noise wasn't just a joke, it was a badge of honour.
That attitude was sustainable when the internet was small and alternatives were scarce. But the moment tools appeared that prioritized things like human ergonomics (python) and human interaction (ruby) the perl community started aging out and dying.
Replies (1)
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@mhoye@cosocial.ca 2026-10-14 13:48
Today the number of people under 50 who'll reach for perl or raku or who cares what it's called as their first choice of tool for anything new is zero. In practice Perl is an esolang now. Torvalds' position is that contributing to the kernel should be _more_ difficult for everyone else, but, through LLM usage, easier for existing kernel developers. Ted Tso's adamant position that "you can't make us learn Rust" is the same insularity. If the kernel was a country, we'd recognize this.