Shocking news from the Learn Perl or Die Association

May 14, 2003 9:50 AM

Test shows 99.99% of US high school seniors can't read Perl. The first part asked students to translate easy Perl phrases into their standard English equivalent, and the second section required students to produce a simple MP3 player in Perl. "I didn't know what the hell any of it meant," said one Senior, "it had lots of slashes and periods and brackets. It was so confusing. I'm feeling rather nauseous." Come on USA, if you can't read Perl, just how are you going to fight for your right to party?
posted by riffola (51 comments total)

I think it's something to do with pancakes. That's my theory...I just can't get "&17)),$b^=$_%64?12:0,@z)[$". That's the confusing part.
posted by Salmonberry at 9:52 AM on May 14, 2003

I'm sick of this anti-america crap! why don't you go back to california?
posted by mcsweetie at 9:59 AM on May 14, 2003

Jeez. They told me all I needed to know was Spanish, and I'd be just fine.
posted by padraigin at 10:02 AM on May 14, 2003

i can't read perl either. but i couldn't read C when i used to look at code either. i bought a book, and perused the C columns in PCMagazine (back when it used to be a PC/programming geeks rag instead of the MS/Intel cheerleader it is these days) and before long i was reading and writing C. how ANYBODY could expect a non-geek high school student without prior training to have the vaguest clue what they were looking at is beyond me, and makes me wonder to what purpose such a test was intended. guess i'll go read the link now.

...
...
...

ok. humor was the purpose. bbspot indeed! well, the q bought it hook line and sinker and never read the link before spewing. i'm going to post this ANYWAY so y'all (specially riffy!) can have a good laugh at my expense when i stumble into #mefi this evening!
posted by quonsar at 10:05 AM on May 14, 2003

s/metafilter/slashdot/ig;
posted by xmutex at 10:12 AM on May 14, 2003

"Perl - The only language that looks the same before and after RSA encryption."

-Keith Bostic
posted by vito90 at 10:12 AM on May 14, 2003

Jeez. They told me all I needed to know was Spanish, and I'd be just fine.

¿Como?
posted by ZenMasterThis at 10:32 AM on May 14, 2003

I can't read Perl, but I can read Cray assembly language [neener!]
posted by MrBaliHai at 10:37 AM on May 14, 2003

Perl coders can't read each other's code anyway.
posted by NortonDC at 10:41 AM on May 14, 2003

¿Como?

Quoi?
posted by chuq at 10:43 AM on May 14, 2003

What's Perl?
posted by konolia at 10:52 AM on May 14, 2003

What's Perl?

It's either a religon or a cult, depending who you ask.
posted by timeistight at 11:02 AM on May 14, 2003

What's Perl?

Perl stands for Practical Extraction and Report Language.

Of course, that's not terribly meaningful. It's a scripting
language that is really excellent for manipulating lots and lots of text. Years ago I used it to grab text data and format it into web pages. It can do all sorts of handy things for you.

If I didn't have to constantly swap my admin hat out for a helpdesk hat, I'd be using perl all over the servers I run to help me keep things shipshape. Alas, no time.
posted by ursus_comiter at 11:07 AM on May 14, 2003

swap my admin hat out for a helpdesk hat

hello? my cupholder broke off. and what does "Fatal Error Reading Drive C" mean?
posted by quonsar at 11:11 AM on May 14, 2003

This is a) not very funny, and b) waaay too narrow in its appeal for a front page post.
posted by eyebeam at 11:11 AM on May 14, 2003

Soyuz nerushimiy respublik svobodnykh...
posted by drstrangelove at 11:21 AM on May 14, 2003

lets make it more narrow then here's the swedish version of it.
posted by dabitch at 11:22 AM on May 14, 2003

unlink @eyebeam;
posted by quonsar at 11:24 AM on May 14, 2003

This is a) not very funny, and b) waaay too narrow in its appeal for a front page post.

I disagree on both counts.
posted by timeistight at 11:26 AM on May 14, 2003

what does "Fatal Error Reading Drive C" mean?

That it's time to get a Macintosh. ;)
posted by ursus_comiter at 11:33 AM on May 14, 2003

Perl stands for Practical Extraction and Report Language.

You make it sound like it's only good for grepping.
*scratches chin* aha!
posted by PrinceValium at 12:06 PM on May 14, 2003

Ruby.
posted by Ayn Marx at 12:12 PM on May 14, 2003

Some Perl poetry for y'all.
posted by soundofsuburbia at 12:15 PM on May 14, 2003

10 REM ***BASIC PROGRAM FOLLOWS***
20 '
30 PRINT "Learn Computer Languages Today!"
40 PRINT
50 PRINT "So you're ready for tomorrow's job market!"
60 PRINT
70 PRINT "With a skill that's NEVER obsolete!"
80 PRINT
90 PRINT "Like knowing how to read Latin."
100 PRINT
110 PRINT "Quis, Quis, Quid, etc."
120 END
posted by kablam at 12:15 PM on May 14, 2003

one time in class back in high school i was not paying attention and i had an idea for a script i was working on... the teacher thought i was writing a note and tried to read it to the rest of the class.
posted by the aloha at 12:21 PM on May 14, 2003 [1 favorite]

Perl stands for Practical Extraction and Report Language

Um, well, no; Perl stands perl. L. Wall wanted to use the name Pearl, but that was taken, so he droped the 'a'. Later, he and others invented backronyms for the name.
posted by Ayn Marx at 12:22 PM on May 14, 2003

aloha, these days, the teacher would have called homeland security on you and your script would have been sent to NSA for decryption as a possible terrorist communication.
posted by quonsar at 12:24 PM on May 14, 2003

I *love* quonsar
posted by riffola at 12:28 PM on May 14, 2003

script would have been sent to NSA for decryption as a possible terrorist communication.

Like this poor kid...
posted by ursus_comiter at 12:35 PM on May 14, 2003

And a nice geeky thread descends into the political poo.
posted by timeistight at 12:39 PM on May 14, 2003

Perl - Pathetically Eclectic Rubbish Lister
posted by SpecialK at 12:41 PM on May 14, 2003

All languages are easy to learn. I mean, if this guy can do it, who couldn't?

Metafilter: Narrowing appeal since 1999.
posted by DrJohnEvans at 12:49 PM on May 14, 2003

About time you guys finally found BBspot.
posted by briggsb at 1:09 PM on May 14, 2003

everything is easy once you know how to do it
posted by Satapher at 1:30 PM on May 14, 2003

Perl's slogan is "There's more than one way to do it"...my follow-up is "...and I don't understand any of them".

I think Perl was best summed up by a quote I once read to the effect of "I've been programming Perl for 8 years, so I'm pretty much a beginner". Damn that language is cryptic!
posted by filmgoerjuan at 1:41 PM on May 14, 2003

Hey, take it easy. A lot of high school seniors have trouble reading English.
posted by MrAnonymous at 1:54 PM on May 14, 2003

Perl's reputation for being cryptic and unreadable is greatly exaggerated, and tends to be repeated mainly by people who have no experience with it. Just thought I'd throw that in.
posted by rusty at 2:35 PM on May 14, 2003

This is a) not very funny, and b) waaay too narrow in its appeal for a front page post.

Geekfilter.
posted by Joeforking at 3:45 PM on May 14, 2003

After I posted my comment above, I realized that just the other day I posted an FPP about a mathematical solution to Poincare's Conjecture.

And I'm griping about narrow appeal?

D'oh.

Please forgive me. I'm cranky today.
posted by eyebeam at 3:57 PM on May 14, 2003

I thought it was pretty simple - knit one, perl one. or am I missing the point?

MrAnonymous is probably right - it was not reading perl they had trouble with, it was writing it in English that threw them.
posted by dg at 4:23 PM on May 14, 2003

I'd have to agree with rusty. While Perl can be made cryptic and hard to read, so can just about any language. Most of the Perl I see is quite nice. Despite this, a favorite quote of mine: "Perl is like sneezing Cheerios through a fan onto a wall."
posted by thebabelfish at 5:15 PM on May 14, 2003

rusty, I do have experience with it. I coded database/datawarehousing ETL tools with it for a living. I just might know what I'm speaking of.

Part of comes from the fact that there are so many different styles accomodated by the language that coders using divergent styles have a LOT of adjusting to do when reading code they didn't write.
posted by NortonDC at 5:22 PM on May 14, 2003

In all of the Perl code not written by me that I've read, I never seem to have to adjust much. Of course, it is entirely possible that I've just never read any really "divergent" code, so take that with a grain of salt.
posted by thebabelfish at 5:30 PM on May 14, 2003

If they had trouble reading Perl, it was probably because the code was poorly commented. Well-commented code can be understood by anyone.
posted by troybob at 6:15 PM on May 14, 2003

They say perl is the glue that holds the internet together

I think most perl zealots sniff said glue a little too much...
oh, and in all honesty aren't regular expressions to ultimately blame for perl's nastiness? No-one's forced to do it without linebreaks and with short-hand variable names. Perl doesn't have to be ugly

Aside from those 2-3 liner crypt scripts in perl, those are k-rad.
posted by shadow45 at 8:13 PM on May 14, 2003

in all honesty aren't regular expressions to ultimately blame for perl's nastiness?

Oh god, no!

perl is lovely when using hashes and regexes freely. It's how the language should be used.

If you're writing perl code like C, then it does look ugly. If you're using it like perl, then it looks great and is easy to read.
posted by sonofsamiam at 8:26 AM on May 15, 2003

Oops! Language war! I didn't mean to be zealous, despite personally loving perl. Yeah, it's totally possible to write really ugly perl, and I've written and read some of that myself (hint: don't look at Comments.pm in Scoop. Just... don't.). It just isn't necessary to do that, was all I was saying. When handled by a competent codewright, perl can be quite beautiful and easy to understand.

I was just reacting to the inevitable "perl is ugly" quotes that always show up when it's mentioned. That idea has gotten weirdly out of hand, in an almost urban-legend kind of way, where it's mostly (not entirely, but mostly) now repeated secondhand by people who have just heard it repeated elsewhere. Or so it seems to me anyway.
posted by rusty at 10:01 AM on May 15, 2003

For bonus points, does anyone recognize the perl code that appears in the story?
posted by briggsb at 10:46 AM on May 15, 2003

yeah, it's on my wall here at work :)
posted by sonofsamiam at 11:11 AM on May 15, 2003

I find Perl ugly, but not because of all the $_-/ crap (hey, I love regexp, the most $_-/ language ever!), but because it's a rather mediocre, overcomplex language with the worst parts of just about any language you care to mention mixed in.

I'm not going to spend time worrying about whether I need to dereference some hash(ref) before trying to access it, and what context to access it in, or faffing about getting arguments out of an obscurely named list, or putting up with the silly way OO is handled -- I'd rather use Ruby and actually get something done without wanting to ram my head through a Wall afterwards.

If I wanted to worry about all that extra cruft, I'd use C :)
posted by Freaky at 5:47 PM on May 15, 2003

kablam, you forgot:

115 GOTO 10
posted by phong3d at 5:24 AM on May 16, 2003