Just Another Perl Hacker

There is exactly one aspect of Perl that annoys me and it's the same aspect that everyone makes fun of Perl for and it's exactly the reason I love Perl too: JAPHs. JAPH = Just Another Perl Hacker. The Perl world is filled with JAPHs.

I think Computer Science is divided into several overlapping camps. You have the mathematicians who think that CS who spend their time with theory and showing that programs and designs are provably correct. You have the software engineers who want to model everything and then do almost no coding and then use the model to verify the code. And then, you have the hackers who just like to play and want to figure things out on their own on their own terms.

I've come to believe I stand in the last group. I like to beat an idea to death and I'm never satisified with any result short of perfection. I don't have the patience for mathematics (nor the brain). I just don't think that way. And software engineering strikes me as more like a cross between bad wizardry, meteorology, middle management, and a pipe dream. Who wants to draw models according to someone else's idea of a good diagram? *co-UML-ugh* I've taken my SE and math classes and learned from both, but I can't really say I like either camp. Finally, I design in vi, I code in vi, I research with Google, and I use print-statements and logs to debug my code. I'm definitely in the "hacker camp."

The term "hacker" has received a lot of press and has been generally defined by the culture, but I think the term finds it's most appropriate meaning in it's original denotation: a dude that literally hacks away at something until he gets what he's looking for or just broken pieces. The term hacker has come to mean: a dude that likes to break into systems and read your email. However, that's more of the realm of the Script Kiddie. Anyway, I digress...

Back to Perl: The problem is that Perl code is extremely expressive. That's why us hackers like it. I feel like saying, "do this or do that", then I say , "this or that." Or, if I prefer "unless this do that," then I say, "unless (this) { that }." Or, "that unless this" or "that if not this," etc. I can think in Perl. I can design in Perl. Perl doesn't enforce very many policies, so I get to choose my own. That's Perl's beauty.

This lack of policy enforcement is also it's bane. As one of the CIS professors (in a Japanese accent) stated during my MS Presentation (just got my diploma in the mail today, btw), "This language is very strange to me. Why did you pick this?" I like it. I didn't tell him that, I gave him the BS about it being the language of the tools we already use. (BS only because I chose those tools partly because of their language, though RT is head and shoulders above any other similar tool I've taken a look at.)

The problem Perl has is that so much of the code written in Perl is simply hacked together. This means that CPAN (a great feature of Perl), has to be carefully sifted to find the module that fits your need. For example, if you need a tool for object persistence, there's Tangram, SPOPS, Class::DBI, Alzabo, DBIx::SearchBuilder, and a few others. Each has their own strengths, but all of them were written by hacker types with more or less lenience towards the math and SE mentalities. I'd say Tangram is the most mathematical and Alzabo is the most SE. DBIx::SearchBuilder is completely in the hacker camp. However, I think they all find themselves written from the JAPH perspective: hacking is a fact of life in Perl.

I'm looking forward to Perl 6. I think part of the reason so much Perl is so hackish is because the Perl 5 language is so hacked. Larry Wall built a simple tool for processing log files and then hacked on more and more features until he got to Perl 5. Now, we have hacked on object support. Hacked on packages. Hacked together subroutines. Hacked together regular expressions. All of it is brilliant, but the "cruft," as Larry Wall calls the entropy that hacking inevitably brings along, it has started to take over. Perl 6 should freshen the slate, especially since the development is very heavily design driven. Anyway, in another year or two when the preliminary versions of Perl 6 start coming out, we'll see.

Enough ranting....now for more hacking....