“Usability” of the Perl Online World for Newcomers - Version 1

I did my best to help newbies welcome in Perl. I actually like beginners, and have a lot of patience to them, because I know no one is born with an innate knowledge of Perl, UNIX or whatever. I often work in the Technion farms and whenever I overhear that someone has a problem my ears become pointed, and I cry “do you need help?” And then show him how to do something that for me may be perfectly obvious. Seriously. I simply enjoy doing that.

I also took some proactive effort in the direction. I wrote the Perl for Perl Newbies lecture series for the Haifa Linux Club. I wrote them with absolute beginners in mind, and decided to teach a very small subset of Perl step by step, with assumption that people will read the man pages afterwards. (and be able to understand them better then).

Lately, out of frustration with the learn.perl.org site, I started working on my own version of a Perl beginners site. Now here is where things went a bit wrong in my opinion. However, I don’t want to defame anyone so I’ll summarize. Both the use.perl.org’s editor and a very prominent Perl figure that stumbled upon the site, believed that I should merge my work with learn.perl.org. At first, I thought it was a good idea, but then discover I am unable to contact the learn.perl.org workers and that their mailing lists was closed for subscription.

Regardless, what’s wrong with two Perl beginners site on the Internet? If I feel that learn.perl.org is inadequate, why should my effort be frowned upon? If we take PHP or Visual Basic for example, than everyone and his mother have a PHP portal where users can post questions (sometimes without subscribing), receive answers, read tutorials and see code snippets. Same for Visual Basic, despite the fact that it is proprietary. I want the same for Perl! I don’t want a couple of concentrated perl.org and perl.com and oreillynet.com sites. I want a real network of independent sites!

It also demonstrates the Perl community’s elitism. I don’t know how it came into being. For example, when I log into EF-Net, the channel #perl displays a long title that reads something like: “Not a Helpdesk! No CGI/WWW/Net::IRC/FAQ.”. OK, there’s also #perlhelp where such questions are accepted. But here are two facts from a user interface designer point of view:

In short, this is a bad UI design. If the Perl gurus so desire not to be disturbed by newbie questions, they should move to #perlgurus or #perlelite or #perlcafe or whatever. But they should not make claim for #perl.

In another IRC network, I (not a newbie by far) was kicked because I pasted a URL and said the word CGI. (there’s a nasty pattern bot there). Some other time, I was kicked out of #perlhelp, because I said the built-in function hex() converts numbers from hexadecimal to decimal, while a moderator believed it converts them to hexadecimal. Naturally I was right (Run perldoc -f hex), but still instead of arguing with me, he kicked me out. Why should a bit of disinformation hurt if there are enough good people to correct it on the IRC as well? And Newbies can learn a lot from such discussions.

Let’s face it: at the moment, there aren’t too many good Perl tutorials online. Many people who ask trivial questions are being conveyed something like “Read the Llama Book, the Camel Book, the Black Panther book, the Perl Cookbook, and then you’ll know how to convert a file to lowercase.” Maybe I’m exaggerating a little, but it seems people are so content with the books that they don’t seem to think people who don’t want them, cannot afford to buy them, or don’t have time for them, are worthy of learning Perl.

I don’t have anything against people trying to make money off Perl by selling books. But these people are the same people who are the Perl project leaders, and so are responsible to make sure Perl is well-documented. If people get frustrated learning Perl, and become unhappy with it, they will criticize “Perl”. Not the Perl documentation. Not the Perl community. Not even the Perl leaders. “Perl”. If Larry Wall et al. care enough about Perl, they should make sure it has good online documentation. They don’t have to do it themselves, as a simple call for action by a very prominent Perl figure will do. (in accordance to Eric Raymond’s “The Cathedral and the Bazaar”)

If we take a look at Python or PHP for instance, then they have excellent online documentation, which is very useful for most if not all newbies. No need to read a book or take a course. Just surf the Internet on your ADSL connection, install a few things on your Windows machine, and presto! You know PHP or Python or Ruby. I seriously doubt if it can be done with Perl with the same ease.

I am grateful for Simon Cozens for making his Beginning Perl book online for free. I did not take a thorough look at the book, but it is more encompassing than anything I’ve seen. But even one book is not enough. People still want step by step tutorials and things they can cut and paste code out of and tinker it to do something.

When are books that cover a Technology something that I find legitimate? When they are not absolutely needed. I learned the Perl DBI by reading the man page and the online site and asking a few questions. Some people do not like man pages too much and would rather buy a book that covers Perl DBI. That’s OK, and there may be a few fine points of working with DBI that I missed with what I call my “bottom-up learning”.

Such books need not be available online if their authors so much don’t desire. However, Perl is very hard to learn from public electronic resources alone. I believe there may even be a clash of interests because the core Perl people also write them and so may not have enough motivation to improve the online documentation. Making them public will resolve that.

That aside, I also believe that making it available online will not dent their sales much. I still would like to buy the Camel Book (which I borrowed from the local Perl Mongers library), and loved regardless if it’s online so I can read it at bed time and stuff. And I generally have no problems using a computer book or tutorial.

Let’s face it, the man pages (or perl*.pod), which are the definitive resource on the exact behaviour of Perl are very bad. Maybe they were OK for expert Perl 4 or Tcl hackers, or those that knew UNIX shells, sed and awk well. But nowadays we can expect people to come even without knowledge of the DOS or Windows command line, much less UNIX wizardry.

Perl is not and cannot be a “point-and-click-no-think” language. I’m not going to fall into the trap of trying to make it so. Even the lamest GUI kiddie eventually learns to invoke a text editor and write some glue code for whatever he needs to get a web-site or whatever working. Perl is much too powerful, to be something like ASP, where you can write wizards to perform most common tasks. In Perl, you can in one script, write a full application. This is something that while perhaps possible in ASP, it was not intended to do.

Still, the fear of writing code and thinking in terms of variables, functions, objects, modules and other abstractions is not something that for people above a certain age is easy to overcome. Visual Basic for Applications is one of the things I like most in Excel, but most people don’t know it, and most books don’t teach it. Why? Because it involves actual coding and people don’t like that. Ironically, it’s very useful, too.

Now, a documentation should guide a newbie step by step and explains: what is a variable? what is a scalar? what is a number? what is a string? how they convert into each other? What is an array and what it is good for? Same for hash, object, etc. All these things may have different semantics in Perl than in most other languages. And all these things need to be explained clearly and reasonably, without depending on an analogy to tools that are way over Mel’s head at her current position.

I don’t want this knowledge to be hidden from the world in some proprietary O’Reilly books. I did my best to remedy it, and Simon Cozens did even more. I think the reason people think Perl is such a poor language to learn or even for complete beginners, is not because of the syntax and semantics themselves, but because of its poor documentation. That put aside, I think publishers making their books available online, will only help them sell more books (assuming these books are good, of course). Otherwise it’s similar to buying an apartment without seeing it first.

Hubris is one of the three great virtues of the programmer according to Larry Wall. But he also noted in “Open Sources” that humility was a good quality as well. Don’t get me wrong some projects have much more hubris than Perl: Python and Linux come to mind. I’m not saying all Pythoneers or Linuxers are hubris-ful. But a small minority is too loud, and there’s a similar case in Perl to a lesser extent.

What do I mean by hubris? “Perl is the greatest language since sliced bread. It has unparalleled text processing and data structures support. It is object-oriented, supports functional programming and any other programming paradigm very well. It’s perfect for almost any task, from powering web-sites to writing GUI to writing games. It’s practically LISP with in-fix notation, and runs on almost any platform imaginable...”

You get the drift? Why I think it’s bad? Because most people don’t like communities with this sales pitch. When recommending Perl to someone, you should discuss one advantage at a time, not overload him with a lot of information. When people see a lot of information they think there’s something fishy about this.

Let’s take a look at a language with just the right amount of hubris: Visual Basic. Right, a language that Microsoft has released several versions of, each adding major things, but is still inferior to perl 5.000. A language whose code can only be deployed on Windows. A language that is many times useless without a whole slew of OCX or OLE components that are freely available at best. Still, Microsoft and the other VB community do not claim it’s the greatest language on earth. “I take your word that Perl/Python/Ruby/LISP/whatever is much superior. VB is stupid, but cute and it gets the job done.” That’s the attitude we should have: Perl gets the job done. Granted, many different jobs. But as far as Mel is concerned it only gets her job done and not the entire world’s ones.

Establish your own Perl beginners site/portal/mailing list/web forum/etc. learn.perl.org is not enough and neither is what I’m going to do. We need more and as many as possible.

Note that if you feel that there isn’t enough traffic or that you should merge with some other site - it’s OK and you can do so. As always reason and experience are your best guidelines as there isn’t a precise rulebook for surviving in real life.

Remember that the biggest Perl guru is you. Not Larry Wall or Tom Christiansen or Damian Conway or whoever. That’s because none of them can dictate to you how to work with Perl, solve problems with it or with something else, etc. As much as I appreciate their efforts at making Perl better and more usable, I don’t think they have or should have a monopoly on where Perl is going to. The world is your oyster.

Be kind to newbies, answer them accurately, don’t confuse them and try to use Perl that is as simple and non-idiomatic as possible (e.g: for the file’s lowercasing example, don’t use Tie::File, and prefer lc() over tr///).

If you don’t have the time to write the entire code for the beginner - politely tell him you can’t help him at this point or whenever. Else, try to actually write some code which would be as clear and commented as possible. Don’t expect beginners to like Perl Golf snippets. They may mistake them for line noise. ;-)

Think about the User-Interface Design of the System. What will the user assume? What would be the first thing he’ll do? What is he going to notice? What is he going to ignore? What is he going to do mechanically? These are all questions that are as pertinent to IRC networks, programming languages or web-sites as they are to Microsoft Word.

I gave the IRC channels examples of bad UI design. OK, gurus, once upon a time there weren’t too many newbies around. But if you don’t want to completely reject them, it is a better idea to move to a different channel.

I believe the Perl Monks site also suffers from such a lacking design. First of all - its name. Do you honestly expect someone to be a Perl “monk” and live in a Perl “monastery”? (I’m Jewish, an Atheist, and very sexually liberated for God’s sake!) Secondly, the site’s design is unattractive, overcrowded and confusing. I remember I was reluctant from participating there, and had troubles understanding what it was all about.

Web forums should involve no registration whatsoever (just fill in the name and E-mail), and not use too fancy a markup syntax, at least not by default. I actually saw a forum (not particularly Perl-related) where markups were placed in brackets, and I wanted to paste some Haskell code... I could not understand how to do it, no matter what I tried .

Publish some of your Perl code online. Establish a Wiki. Don’t ask anybody for permission - just do it. There will be chaos first, but order will emerge out of it eventually. And if not, Google and friends will like us better. ;-)

Rik van Riel of the Linux Kernel fame, told me and some IRC folks about a system which was written for internal use by Connectiva (his former workplace), that uses a DMoz-like category tree, where Slashdot-like comments are added. This sound like a nice integration of a few ideas. The Connectiva code is written in PHP and is not ready for release. Nevertheless, I think tweaking Slash to do just that should not be too hard, and may prove as a useful alternative or a complement to Wikis.

Let’s suppose that despite all the positive changes and having a book nearby, Mel feels she needs a face to face guidance. She asks around her workplace, and discovers a fellow worker, by the name of Rachel Southern ( actually a character in a story I’m writing who fits perfectly here) is a first-class perl guru. Rachel has been programming since she was 14, knows UNIX, Perl and many other languages well, and is a very nice, sociable person. So Mel asks Rachel if she can tutor her in Perl.

Rachel, however, being the expert that she is, is busy with work, and prefers to spend her weekends relaxing, socializing (online and in real life), and hacking on open-source projects. Moreover, she lives very far from Mel’s apartment. So she tells Mel that if she wishes to go to Mel’s apartment on a Saturday or a Sunday, and tutor her with Perl (or UNIX in general), Mel would have to pay her a substantial amount of money per hour. Mel accepts, as she realizes the help she’ll get out of Rachel, will help her in her work, which in turn will be very well worth the money.

Was Rachel “greedy” or “unfriendly” in asking for money? No. I was told a technician in Israel charges $50 an hour. Many lawyers and other professionals will charge much more. The time of competent persons is the most precious resource on our planet (except perhaps for human rationality), and Rachel has no selfish interest to spend so much time helping Melissa.

I was criticizing the fact that books costed money and were not available online only because the reproduction of books in Electronic form is zero. But a time a person spends helping another one is priceless. Now, if Mel lived in the same block as Rachel, or otherwise they were very good friends, then Rachel could have chosen to reject the payment. (My friend and I lost track of how even we are regarding the pizzas we ate and we could not care less about this fact).

It is true that Richard Stallman (RMS) travels around the world visiting various free software user groups, at the cost of the travelling expenses alone. He have also consistently answered the E-mails of me and everyone else I know, and is available by phone most of the time. However, Stallman’s purpose in life is propagating free software and he is the spiritual father of the free software and open source movement. As such, he accepts the fact that he has become a saint and does not charge money for that. As he once told me and some other IGLU’ers: “Advocacy is everything I do”.

Most of us, however, are trying to make the best use of our time, including getting the bills paid or contributing to free software. As such, our time is precious enough so a substantial amount of it that is used to help a less capable peer will cost money. It does not mean that spending some time for writing a straightforward ten-liner for someone should, though. (in that case, there’s usually no way to acquire the money in the first place)

There’s a limit to anything. I remember that once I hanged on the IRC, and someone there showed me a bot he or his clique wrote in mIRC-script and wanted to convert to Perl. The bot was a bit complex, so I told him I did not want to convert it, as I had no selfish interest in getting it ported. I suggested him to learn Perl and do the porting himself. He understood. I’m not sure the bot was ever ported, but the gods help only those that help themselves.

Like I noted earlier, I believe many of the existing resources, while being perfectly fine for veterans may scare away newbies. www.perl.com is crowded with too many links, too much content, and too much oreillynetism. Since it is the first hit on Google, it should be a decent page where newbies can easily find their way in. Something like the Python Homepage or PHP’s. Plain, simple and effective. (note that I don’t have a problem with the O’Reilly Net format as a general rule, it’s just not suitable for newbies who may have never heard of O’Reilly or do not have the time to put up with it.) The Python.org site, for instance, contains just the right links for a newbies and nothing more. It has a rather cheesy site, but it is much more usable than www.perl.com. The latter has links to a host of other O’Reilly sites (what for), some articles that are way over Melissa’s head, no explanation of what Perl is all about, links to many O’Reilly books (again: why?), and is generally overcrowded with information. This is not a community site. It is practically a blunt promotion of everything O’Reilly!

www.perl.com as it is can be renamed as perl.oreilly.com or whatever. But otherwise, O’Reilly should not make a claim for the homesite of the Perl language and Perl community as they are not the only player in the game.

Also, I kindly ask the authors and publishers of the core Perl books to place them online. If a book teaches you advanced things that you can learn on your own, that do not absolutely require a book (like Damian Conway’s “Object Oriented Perl”), then putting it online would not be necessary, but still a nice gesture. However, it cannot be said on Programming Perl (the Camel Book), Learning Perl (the Llama Book), the Perl Cookbook, or Advanced Perl. I could not care less however, for Perl for Oracle DBAs, because it’s highly specialized and of no interest to Melissa or Robert. Rachel can easily learn it on her own should the need arise, and Joanna’s knowledge of Perl should not extend to this speciality.

There are other popular sites or resources, that may seem quite hostile to newbies. Perl Monks is one. use.perl.org should actually be quite good. Its standard Slashdot-like seemingly-underground look can actually appeal to newbies who wish to keep up to date with Perl news. What the editors should do is answer newbie submissions themselves should there be such, and only then tell them that it’s the wrong place to ask. Remember, people don’t read Submission Guidelines or whatever, and even I act mechanically on many web-sites. (don’t you?)

Generally, if one of the new resources would be better than the existing ones, then it would eventually supersede it. Yahoo and AltaVista were superseded to most extents by the much superior and more user and community friendly Google and Mozilla Directory, and we should not fear a healthy competition either. We should not concentrate our efforts, because we will also reduce the number of people doing them in the first place. And as Eric Raymond noted in The Cathedral and the Bazaar, in a distributed Bazaar model, the output grows linearly to the number of people involved.

While the Perl’s source code was maintained in a very much Bazaar-like way, the Perl Community has been relatively Cathedral like looking for a selected small number of shrines. Let’s change that.