A professional medium might have been gate-kept being paying coursework. Perl was not: the super-complete documentation was right there, in the distribution; the remarkably intelligently written course book was right there on everyone's shelves and in your local public library; the in-depth books same thing; And quickly enough even free on the net; the expert-built module library was all there to use and study; the experts were giving their time freely, writing deep dive articles at the simple prompt of worthy questions in addition to columns on topics which I guess were not getting enough questions.
For a professional medium, the only lack that I can tell is from a marketing point of view: installing the distribution for example, probably did not highlight enough how extensive the documentation was.
Sorry for being salty earlier, but learning a language still takes at least a day or two of solid reading of the official manuals. https://perldoc.perl.org if you want a web version.
There was a fifteen year period where the best way of finding out what something meant in a programming language was to Google it. Pre-AI, post the predominance of newsgroups and offline documentation.
Try googling "$|++". It just doesn't work. Never has.
Now Google "file.flush". First hit is the answer you need on SO.
You did not need to google anything. The complete documentation was right there, next to the interpreter, on your machine. Ready for scanning and reading from top to bottom; and broken in sections that were actually relevant; and ready to search in bulk if you prefered with whichever local search tool you cared for.
No need for google. (And google was run by python fans; probably saw no need to support searching for '$|++'.)
And I notice "post the predominance of offline doc". Well that's one problem right there: As of 2025, there is still nothing that beats perl 5 docs as ~260 man pages. Probably LLM-based AI is getting there, at least for people who have difficulty with text. But for the rest of us, it's VERY useful to know that there is solid (offline) doc.
Also to be fair, a modern Perl app doesn't even need to use `$|++` since the framework, even if it's raw Plack, will manage output flushing for you since you're no longer banging on raw stdout. I'd say Perl suffers from an even worse problem of legacy tutorials than PHP, but the size of PHP's userbase and thus sheer number of bad tutorials makes it worse there.
is too curt, and therefore may feel hostile especially for native English-speakers who are used for polite communication to be more wordy. But cultural things aside it's actually a good working solution.
I disagree, at least when it comes to the web (of those days). What's the point of rewriting what's already well- and accurately-written in the docs? What better job are the people on that message board going to do with regards to such a small, specific syntax feature? The point of those "communities" wasn't to answer questions like "what is this variable?" but rather to have actual discussions on the language, such as how to structure applications, design patterns, projects, etc. Imagine trying to build an online community for this purpose, only to spend your days answering the most basic questions possible that were already explained many times before.
Eventually, a website more tailored to such questions was created - Stack Overflow - and there things were very different than in subject-specific communities: there was no "community", there were no discussions, just a big mess of questions. It had a purpose and it served it well. Now it's dying too because of LLMs, but I digress.
Now, in a different scenario, say a colleague asking you that question at work, a direct answer is warranted, but without letting the colleague know that this information and a lot more is a just a few keypresses away would be a wasted opportunity, and not particularly a good way to help that colleague progress.
You can only spoon feed people so much. At a certain point relying on other people to just give you the answer every time you don't know something is lazy. It's like you have no respect for their time.
Golly. There are still some who think it is ok to be rude to newbies.
$|++ is arcane to anyone not steeped in Perl
The newbies could be warmly welcomed and shown respect.
But no, RTFM.
That is rude to somebody drowning in newness. If you do not want to answer their question, then don't. But some people seem to get a kick out of being rude to weaker people
All the times it happened to me, back in the '90s this made life really much harder than it needed to be.
>Golly. There are still some who think it is ok to be rude to newbies.
the entire tech industry is driven by humans and we're really bad at everything. once the AIs take over things should be much better, except for the occasional hallucination.
> made life really much harder than it needed to be
If only you had read the manual...
Seriously though, of course I wasn't advocating for rudeness, and trust me, I remember how rude some people were back then in tech-related boards, this was not a unique Perl thing. I'm advocating for pointing people to the sources of information they're looking for.
> You've made my shitlist
Well then I hope it's posted somewhere I can refer to at will so that I don't have to ask you on a message board like a noob.
There, the problem illustrated
"You are not serrious" is a downright hostile attitude
"man perldoc" as an answer can be translated as "f*^&%k off you stupid...."