Originally published at Perl Weekly 603

Hi there!

I am sure most of you reading this newsletter have heard that "perl is unreadable" or "perl is a write only language", or maybe that "perl is dead". In many cases this comes from people who have never actually saw perl. You might have not named this phenomenon, but this is called prejudice.

Prejudice is having (usually negative) opinion about an individual, a group of people, or a thing, with partial or no real knowledge about the subject. It's name is quite clear. It is having a judgement before (pre) having knowledge.

One can see prejudice as a phenomenon that happens naturally, but it can also be manufactured and used for personal, economic, or political gains. We saw that happening in the last 25 years with Perl. I saw a number of very interesting, though painful cases.

Prejudice against Perl clearly has way less personal consequences than other forms of prejudice, but maybe because of that it is easier to discuss it.

In one case, a few years ago, someone explained to me that he writes both in Perl and in Python. When he writes in Perl he does not care about indentation or good programming practices as Perl works that way as well. Then he continued explaining that Perl is unreadable. He did not seem to realize the absurdity that the cause and effect relationship might not be of language->readability, but rather effort-to-write-clean-code->readability.

I often hear people writing in Perl talking about the code being unmaintainable. It is a type of internalized prejudice when you could know otherwise, but because of the social pressure of viewing the negative aspects one will adopts, repeats, and thus strengthens the prejudice. "If even Perl developers say so then it must be true."

Once, more than 10 years ago, when I was at FOSDEM I talked to someone at the pre-conference beer drinking party. She explained that at their company they would not consider hiring anyone who had ever written in Perl. - Clearly a very stupid idea as there are some brilliant Perl programmers. However, this is where prejudice leads to. It does not only hurt the Perl developers, it also hurts the people having the prejudice.

How is prejudice manufactured? One key aspect of creating and then increasing this prejudice against Perl and even against people who wrote in Perl was the repetition of lies that are now accepted as "facts". Another aspect was that saying bad things about Perl seemed like a requirement to be accepted in the Python community. It certainly helped some people who moved from Perl to Python to "be forgiven". I remember when I first started to write in Python and go to Python events, there was a some pressure to distance myself from my "sinful past" writing Perl. So far I managed no to cave in and so I still receive such demands once in a while.

How to fight prejudice? There are many articles about this topic, I am sure it will be interesting to read some of them.

That's it for this weeks rant.

In the meantime I continue running two instances of the Open Source Development Course. One in Hebrew for a mix of biologists and programmers. Some of whom are students and some with work experience. The other one is in English with extra focus on Perl. I hope that the participants in this course will soon start opening issues and sending Pull-Requests to various CPAN modules.

Enjoy your week!

--
Your editor: Gabor Szabo.

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Perl Weekly #603 - Generating prejudice