Dr. Dysphora's Journal: The Perl Community: Killing the Goose That Laid the Golden E

I have taught no less than
2000 users to write Perl 5
in a Bay Area community college.

Perl 6 is an exercise in egotism
whose likeness would be Kernighan
and Ritchie suddenly changing the
assignment operator to * and the
ternary operator to #.

Perl 6 fixes what is not broken. I have never had
students who did not understand
that $L[5] gets an array
element and is a scalar
because it is ONE thing.
Same for hash elements.

The idiotic $L[5] in Perl 6
being $L->[5] in Perl 5 is
beyond lunacy. That arrow
means "points at". The
notation $L[5] in no way
signifies a pointer ... as it does in
C or Perl 5 ... the sensible
Perl.

But what is beyond forgiveable
is that Perl 6 has made the
market of new Perl books
nonexistent. This alone
assures Perl's eventual
nonexistence. Why would an
author want to write a Perl
book that is obsolete in some
fuzzy time period.

But, hey, I've only taught a
couple thousand REALLY REALLY
good Perl programmers. What
in hell do I know?? And that's
just the attitude of Conway,
Torkington, and the rest of
the Insufferables who cannot
see simple realities like the
death of the Perl book market.

I'll be retiring from teaching
in a few years so, in a very
real sense, I don't give a
damn what they do. However,
as I tell my classes: "Love
Perl. Hate the Perl community".

Also hate the "any style is
okay" ethos of this dweebish
"community". I enforce strict
style guidelines and employers
have ONLY congratulated me on
the excellence of my Perl
graduates.

A pox on the Perl "community".
Perl 5 is the end of Perl and
the infinite delay of Perl 6
only ensures that Perl books
slowly disappear from Books In
Print.

Great going, nitwits.

Dr. Dysphoria

Ignoring the facts

[merlyn]

We just released the 4th edition of "Learning Perl" last summer, and "Intermediate Perl" this month. We're very committed to keeping the flagship tutorial books for the Perl community up to date until Perl6 arrives. There are also a number of other Perl books in the pipeline at O'Reilly that I cannot comment on.

If other publishers are slowing down on turning out the junk that spells Perl in all-caps and promises a complete Perl education in some small number of hours or days, that's actually better for the community, not worse.

I won't speak to your point about Perl6 syntax changes, but I thought your point on books really didn't stand.

Re:Ignoring the facts

[Dr. Dysphora]

Oh, about the book market, Randal. How narcissistic of you to imply that because YOUR book is coming out, the Perl book market, ergo, is healthy. Go to Borders. All the Perl books fit on one shelf. Most are very peripheral outdated ones like Perl for Win32 from, like 1999. Freaking PHP commands about three or four shelves. How is it not the quintessence of common sense to realize that the paucity of new Perl books is due to Perl 6 putting the whole market in limbo. Who wants to write a Perl 5 book ...

Re:Ignoring the facts

[merlyn]

"Advanced C Programming By Example" - Out of print. Amazon sales rank 842,855

5 stars out of 5 by ten reviewers. Who knows how many of them were astroturf?

Let's compare that to:

"Learning Perl, 4th edition" - Amazon sales rank 2,564

4 stars out of 5 by 265 customer reviews.

You're blowing smoke, dude. Can I have some of that? I could use a good hallucinogen today.

Man, what did you put in your tea?

[Anonymous Coward]

But what is beyond forgiveable is that Perl 6 has made the market of new Perl books nonexistent.

What with Higher Order Perl, Perl Best Practices, Advanced Perl Programming and Intermediate Perl, the last 12 months have been one of the best Perl 5 book periods ever. Heck, advocates of other languages are cheering HOP and PBP, fer crying out loud!

--Aristotle [plasmasturm.org]

Re:Man, what did you put in your tea?

[Dr. Dysphora]

What are you smoking, dude?? Most of the Perl books at Borders are, like, 2000 to 2002 pubs. Many are for miniscule audiences (like the Perl LWP book ... good but small audience). I am a published author of a book "Advanced C Programming by Example" that got 5 stars on /. and from all Amazon reviewers. I do have a clue. It's a sad freaking day when PHP books are pumped out like bilgewater from a ship whilst new general Perl books are just not coming out. PHP is a pathetic farce ... another "flavor of

You have lost touch with the Perl 5 community.

[sigzero]

Let us just examine the books that have come out in the last year:

• Higher Order Perl
• Learning Perl
• Intermediate Perl
• Perl Best Practices
• Beginning Perl Web Development: From Novice to Professional
• Pro Perl Debugging
• Pro Perl Parsing
• Perl 6 Now
• Pro Perl
• Perl Testing: A Developer's Notebook
• Perl Hacks: Rough Cuts Version

I am sure that I did not get them all but it looks like Perl 5 books are doing pretty well

Re:You have lost touch with the Perl 5 community.

[Dr. Dysphora]

You've got to be kidding. How many GENERAL Perl 5 tutorial books have come out in the last two years?? Gawd, this thread is killing me. By the way, dude, I teach HIGHER ORDER PERL ... you know with references making objects, N-dimensional data structures, database connectivity, IO::Socket and client/server ... you know ... HARD STUFF!? I am the ONLY teacher of Advanced Perl in the entire Bay Area community college system. I ate books like "Effective Perl Programming" quite literally while some of you

Re:You have lost touch with the Perl 5 community.

[Dr. Dysphora]

Sorry buddy but ZERO excellent tutorial Perl books exist. That's why my students use my shrink-wrapped notes for Perl and Advanced Perl. I'm a published author and I've got to tell you that most tech books are abysmal and some Perl books are wretched. I'm just the guy that O'Reilly would LOVE to write a Perl book but I won't lift a finger to write a book that would knock your socks off (and it would) as long as they keep authors on the Perl 5/6 tightrope with no place to go. Why write a Perl 5 book whi

The perl community is an asset

[Anonymous Coward]

..if you don't know how to benefit from it that's a sign of your problems rather than anybody elses.

The perl community has provided me with many things including
* Help finding jobs both when leaving university, and since
* Free help and support in the development of my skills, through Technical Meetings, mailing lists, books, irc, 1 to 1 conversations and online articles.
* Free tools to solve problems using CPAN, etc
* loads more that I don't have time to list

Re:The perl community is an asset

[Dr. Dysphora]

Yeah. Score: 0. That's fair. My mantra?? Love Perl, hate the Perl "community". It's still my mantra. A colleague of mine once went to a Perl conference and described it as: "The largest collection of unattractive males I've ever seen gathered in one place". This reflects my sense of this "community" where style doesn't count and something is "correct" if the script runs before your boss fires you. I am Larry Wall's sworn enemy in this regard. Readable, not "brilliant", coding style is NUMERO UNO in