Why do people hate perl

People aren't punished for pointing fingers because that's exactly what the execs are doing. If it's been going on, unresolved, for quite a while, most of the good developers will have moved on, and you might consider doing the same.

A few members of the team, in no particular order:. Hubris can be one of the cardinal virtues of programmers, but they misunderstand. Hubris can be defined as excessive pride, but in the case of programming, it should be defined as "the quality that makes you write and maintain programs that other people won't want to say bad things about. Our office manager handles much of the paperwork for me. I have never had to bill a client here. Our sales rep is excellent and is pulling in quality contracts for us.

We have a cleaning lady who comes in weekly and makes my life much easier and knows better than to rearrange my files. Without them, and many others, I wouldn't have my job. It's a team effort and everyone needs to understand how they can rely on the others and that means trusting the others. Cheers, Ovid Join the Perlmonks Setiathome Group or just click on the the link and check out our stats.

This attitude makes the sysadmin look like a jerk. A sysadmin must be able to communicate with the users of a system, not only to inform them of upgrades and changes, but to also listen to users who need certain features. Just because you know the root password does not allow you to act like you are their manager. At nearly every site I've been at with shared machines, the sysadmins would announce major changes to software at least 2 weeks in advance if not sooner with several reminders in between.

If the software was a minor change, it would usually be installed right over the existing one, while major changes would involve shuffling directories and scripts from the sysadmin end to make sure that both the old and new versions were usable. In cases where old versions had to be dropped as supposed any more than 2 major revisions of software is a pain , the users were given several months of time to prepare, and in rare cases, the old version was installed on a specific low-use machine for those users that could not abandon it.

In nearly all cases, there was also a way to access the cutting-edge versions of programs as well, but you had to ask the right people. But as with the old versions as well as these versions, the sysadmin flatly stated that no tech support will be available beyond standard problems. And to the best of my knowledge, the sysadmins worst complaints were that people didn't know what pine's "Reply to All?

In addition, this doesn't just apply to perl. Perl might be a faster moving target than those, but the same ideas still apply: the sysadmin must be in communication with their users at all times in order to do an effective job, instead of acting like a god that does magical things when they feel like it. Michael K. Neylon - mneylon-pm masemware. Change Management system are put into place just for this situation. Sysadmin decides that there should be an upgrade from Gofer 1 to Gofer 2.

His request is reviewed and Ms. Developer says, "Wait! You can't change that yet, it will break all my code!!! Your node just happened to tread very heavily on a very sore toe right now and what follows may seem inflammatory. It isn't meant that way. Please read generally when you think I'm getting personal. I agree with your sentiment that everyone needs to be responsible for making sure they're doing the right things, for using the most idiomatic approaches available, and for learning as much as possible as the tools they're working with.

However, I think you may be overstepping things a bit by not acknowledging your part of the process. As a SysAdmin, it's your job to help ensure that the developers have the information available and to help make certain they know how to obtain the information they need. One of the most frustrating things I'm going through right involves a set of unknown network admins who are clearly ignoring the advice and tips I'm trying to give them. It uses CGI. As one might expect, these modules weren't installed on the target server.

Because the admins on that server either don't know or refuse to use the CPAN module. I know these instructions are being passed on to the Admins in question How do I know they're doing this? Because CPAN. I don't know why they're doing this. But I suspect it's because they don't think a lowly software developer is smart enough to take the time to find a community like the Monastery, to learn basic Unix skills, to understand enough about their job to provide useful suggestions including recommended permissions and file locations.

If that's what happened with the folks that I have to deal with, then I find that unprofessional and inexcusable. You're right; it is my job not to cast blame inappropriately and to take responsibility for my code. However, it's your job as Tilly , Ovid , Masem , et al have suggested, to take the time to review what the developers have given you, to provide good and complete answers when asked, and to prompt for additional information when you think there are questions that aren't being asked.

Furthermore, it's your job to foster a spirit of teamwork in your organization. If you do not have a "team ethic" in place and you wish one existed, it's your responsibility to start one. Start by setting aside the advocacy. Some people know and like Unix, others know and live with Windows. This is business, not religion. Consider spending time with your software developers. Ask them what their frustrations are. Ask if there's anything you can do to make their work easier.

Do this often enough, they'll start learning and--through your example--responding in kind. It does work; I've seen it happen. On the other hand, if you cop a superior attitude, your co-workers will start avoiding you. They'll start thinking you're incompetent and they'll start thinking you're an intolerable jerk. I don't really care if you like Perl, but I do care when you make asinine and unfounded assumptions about me, my skills, or my potential.

We're all part of the same team, which means each of our efforts are directed toward getting the job done, typically for profit. So stop wasting your company's money by bemoaning the lack of cooperation. Instead, take control of the situation Consider software developers as colleagues and start treating them like people.

I freely confess that I don't know Unix very well. However, I can learn it and am slowly learning it. I'm having to fumble my way in the dark because I don't have people outside the Monastery that I can use as mentors.

I can read all I want, but books rarely cover real world scenarios. Man pages are fine, but many are either poorly written or so detailed that those missing the basic education get lost in the details.

I'd happily work with a NetAdmin to learn this stuff--if I could find one that's civil enough to give me the time of day. If you find that a problem was caused by a mistake in the code, then diplomatically report that back to the developer in a kind way, one that doesn't start with "You stupid jerk. And, yes, my "script" uses strict, -w, and -T. Give me enough of a break to know what I don't, to accept my limitations, and to ask questions that, while basic to you, are important for me.

Furthermore, give me enough of a break to be able to learn what I need to do a good job. If I make a mistake and you find it, I want you to tell me--preferably without rancor, antagonism, or oneupmanship. I guess people who are familiar with my recent postings like tilly would know that I am NOT an admin at this site, but I have been at the past.

So what I'm experiencing now is empathy and sympathy for the SysAdmins because the developers here are I would say awful, but I like them as people. Perhaps misguided is a better term. My job at this site has to been come in and provide new dialogue between the testers and the developers, and audit code that is broken. In the course of that, I wind up writing new code. Which just reinforces how much "good code" as you and I write is better than "bad code" which I see more of every day.

I had assumed that people were familiar with my ongoing exploits. For the full story, please see my most recent threads. I will perhaps update this node later to include links to particular nodes. I am exhausted and unfortunately developed a cold at the moment. To resolve issues on development servers here I keep the systems perl separate from the users. Now that Sun is maintaining it's own Perl distribution as of 2. Also this argument reminds be of an a coder's complaint I heard recently "The only problem with developing user interfaces is the user".

Your developers are well known in Scotland at least as jobs-worth, i. Aka unprofessional, selfish gits. First step - take a break. The people here aren't your enemy. Neither are your co-workers. Neither is perl.

Second step - gather some examples and evidence of bad code. Gather some examples of good coding standards from successful perl using companies.

Go to your management and make your case: Our perl scripts need mucho maintenance because they are not modularised We are constantly reinventing the wheel - this is costing us money with no good reason Our scripts are not robust We have an adverserial culture where no one is prepared to take responsibility. We're supposed to be working as a team but because we aren't, we're spending more time infighting than fixing problems You can't change your fellow coders if they don't want to change.

They may even thank you. Your co-workers won't but maybe they will find new jobs. Good luck, I've been in the same boat and it really sucks. Judging by the knee-jerk reactions early on and the more recent follow-ups, I am inclined to say that maybe we're not all fully reading what we're responding too.

Possibly not listening to our fellow monks' rants. I am a system administrator, by profession. I primarily work with unix based machines, but I also deal with other platforms as well. What is said is true, there is more then one way to do it. Many system's admins take different approaches, often times what I would consider lazy approaches, and some take approaches that are much to difficult and time consuming to maintain.

Now mix in dare I say whiny programmers who each have their own style of writing, who have their own preconcieved ideas about "the way things should be" and at their last job, "It was always like that".

Are you seeing my point? Just because perl is still 5. I am not a sysadmin. I am a handyman. I just happen to know computer programming, and it's been my hobby since age I also repair computers and maintain a handful of websites. I consider myself an advanced Windows user, but I want to transition to Linux in the future. I learned Perl, because it is like a Swiss army knife.

Learning this single language not only allows me to write server-side scripts, but it also allows me to write scripts for Linux and Windows of course. I currently use TinyPerl 5. It seems to me that your problem is not really with perl but with people which includes yourself. I once encountered a Haskell programmer who was sure that Haskell questions were underrepresented on Stack Overflow, and gave the example that while Lua and Haskell had the same number of users, Haskell SO questions were much more scarce than Lua.

He proceeded to construct a convincing-sounding story as to why Lua devs may need to ask SO questions while Haskell had other ways of getting answers. But he was going off of his anecdotal impression, which was in fact quite wrong: there are regularly twice as many SO Haskell questions asked per month as Lua. I get a lot of hypotheses wrong myself. I theorized that it might be because so many questions were already answered that people were visiting existing ones rather than asking new ones.

But instead of just deciding the metric was useless and trusting my own story, I looked at the data, and in fact visits to existing Ruby questions have been declining just as fast as new questions have.

I could tell a new story about how Ruby developers were particularly unlikely to visit existing questions. My thoughts exactly. It says what languages people are comfortable disliking publicly. I found the results interesting. There is no context to the results. It says what languages people are comfortable disliking publicly, in the very specific context of a job search or career advancement. Maybe SO should put polls on the home page to collect this kind of data instead of trying to extrapolate broader meaning from a field on a resume than that field was ever meant to convey.

Or… your opinions are different from others at orders of magnitude more than you might have realized. I would expect to see languages such as Malbolge, Whitespace, and Brainfuck on the top. Really noone wants to write code in them. Probably because no one takes them seriously so no one feels bothered to include them when comparing. In a sense, the point is that the question is ill-defined in the strict sense of the word. Or were there not tags for esoteric languages at our disposal? There is no problem with the question; the problem here is with overly-pedantic readers who were unable to construe what the article aimed to analyse.

Brainfuck is a programming language, that is the whole point of the brainfuck exercice, to create a programming language. When I read the question Brainfuck was the first thing to pop into my mind. I do not dislike Brainfuck, however it is the last programming language I would want to have to use, by far.

I would much rather code in assembly. Thankfully nobody is forcing me to use it. Does it mean I dislike it? By the way, I have programmed in all 4 top hated languages although not extensively. With PHP I have a love-hate relationship, it gets things done, nothing less, but unfortunately nothing more either. Unfortunately not the best kind of verbose — more like inelegant, repetitive words when I would much rather use braces, commas, operators and then add a few comments in the spared space.

For some reason, I tend to write huge functions in these languages. I missed the fine distinction, thanks. There is a difference. Surely they are all languages, and should all feature in the language graph? It would be rendudant to feature them.

The language is still Python. As noted in the post, I set a threshold of mentions for the first figure describing programming languages. Why would someone bother listing JSON as a tag to work with? There are currently 23 jobs on careers. Then when I got a real job and learned it from experts, I learned to love it. But that was almost 30 years ago, and only did it for about 18 months…. Nobody really cares about GOTO not sincerely, anyway. Nasty programmer will find other ways to mess up, and skillful programmers will know when to use a GOTO.

It was not a happy reunion. What are the most disliked posts? Well I dunno…how about reoccurring blog posts using R about who likes or dislikes what? There could be different numbers of people who liked frontend and disliked backend, and people who liked backend and disliked frontend.

There is mainly 3 large clusters: Microsoft related, Web related and System related. I see that on the relationship graph, it seems to be related to regex which I have used maybe people who use Perl are doing a lot of text processing? R may be the most non-disliked, but is that only due to the lack of people who would ever think about R putting it there?

Sure is it growing — but on a pound-per-pound basis what is the outcome? How well liked are each of the languages? What they value matters much more!

Slash sounds pro on a kiddie guitar, A chef can still cut better than you with a cheap knife. There is value an significance in each language, but discussing which hammer and nails to use all day, and no house is being built. That what they do say on SO may have very little in common with what they actually do?

I would definitely expect Javascript and Assembly to rank higher on the dislikes, along with PHP then. I think these dislikes are more about preferences. What will you replace js with? Assembly is great. This article is trash. Any data scientist drawing some sort of conclusion from this article should simply give up.

What about Eiffel or Assembly? Maybe of each language, how many people are happy with the language and how many want to switch away or has switched would be more indicative of what this article was trying to illustrate. This comment is trash. This blog post was interesting and fun.

Climb down off of your high horse and joing the rest of humanity as a reasonable human being. Represent at that level. This article belongs on some satire site. Discredit them with some sort of meaningful argument, some sort of metric, something that the community can absorb, adapt, and refine, but this? Just a massive waste of time. It may not be a dislike. Though, perhaps the author of this article has taken a few too many liberties in broadly interpreting what the data means.

There you go. I hate programming in PDP 7 opcodes with no comments. To the point where I refuse to ever do it again. OSX users can no longer claim to have the more unix-like dev environment. It would be nice to be able to ping from the windows subsystem. It would be more wise for Microsoft to go the other way. Get rid of their internals and make Windows subsystems Linux. Actually WSL is too late to change the game.

JavaScript is a programming language? Why stop there? Bash is a programming language? When you are on a primarily compiled, backend-focused architecture C, C , Java, etc. It is usually not a love-hate game with those tags. IMHO people dislike stuff in SO that they simply do not use or understand and if there are too many questions about it people will simply use dislike to remove them from the lists. Who they are? How did they end up like that? People like Justin Bieber above Bach, Mcdonalds above an intricate curry.

People will be people, irregardless off thing. I wish this article was written in Japanese, English lacks certain types used to express emotion. Such a stupid simple, boring language. Why am I even speaking it?? Oh yea because everyone else does. True emotions are not meant to be expressed in words, silly. Likes or dislikes of a programming language are very primitive and basic emotions and can be very well expressed in English or through emoticons.

But when it comes to the OS I work from day to day, I prefer the option that solves the same problem as any of the others but is the most familiar to me. They dislike Linux, because it is associated with command-line interfaces in contrast to GUIs. For instance, they were forced to learn it or they had some other bad experience like meeting an arrogant operator from hell.

I think this was an extremely arrogant comment. As a kid my first experience with computers was DOS, then Windows 3. Eventually I discovered Linux and learned to use it both for work and personal use and its a perfectly OK alternative operating system that for work at least is better than windows in many ways. Perl is the best language on the list by an order of magnitude, IMHO. Perl developers are in high demand, and the work usually pays very well.

What I hate are new languages that are un-necessary, because they do not improve on languages that already exist. Oh, and the dreadful Focus report generator that makes queries that could be coded in minutes in SQL into significant development projects.

Literally every Perl project I have inherited from another developer or team has had to be rewritten from scratch. NEVER…tried it once with a few thousand line code base. You are describing bad programming.

Every good programmer knows that one of the most important aspects of coding is to make the code readable and readily understandable. You seem to have had the misfortune to inherit the work of smart-alecs that wrote obscure code because they thought it made them look clever.

In fact it makes them look like the incompetent, unprofessional idiots that they are. They probably would be unable to maintain even their own code if they had to come back to it a few months later. Unfortunately Perl, with its great freedom in how things are done, seems to attract that sort of person more than languages like Python where the language offers fewer options, and goes some way to preventing the worst forms of obscurantism.

I would not blame the language. Tom I agree, but I ultimately blame both. Look Perl is what it is. That alone is impressive. I am not bashing Perl per-say, but I am declaring that there are better alternatives out there for this use case today. Can Perl do all of that? Sure it can. IMHO having used them all.. Perl is the hardest to read and maintain in a team of people. The irony in my next statement is that before coming to Python I was appalled that it enforced a white space rule… After learning Python and working on larger teams I have come to understand that this is in fact one of my favorite features of the language.

Something about writing code that a software engineer from any background can easily read and understand. Python is a great language. It is easier to learn than Perl and does not seem to make people want to write obfuscated code. Nevertheless Perl is a more powerful and versatile language. In any case our likes and dislikes have little influence. Unless we are lone geniuses or running the company we, as software developers, have to use whatever language or languages our employer has chosen … unless it really cannot do the job, in which case we are allowed to suggest alternatives.

This has made it possible and thus it will happen to make Perl code a spaghetti mess of syntaxes. This makes perl code difficult to read much less grok.

It is surprising to me that enough developers have used Perl for it to be the most hated language. My experience with the Perl hate is it's usually from younger people by which I mean anyone under about It violates everything some may have been taught as part of their software engineering program: it's difficult to read, maintain, and support.

But, it exists for a reason and it's ridiculously good at that purpose. If I want to process lots of text, I do not use Python, I whip out perl. And usually it's fine, the little bits of perl here and there that glue the world together aren't usually that egregious to maintain particularly in context of the overall mechanism it's being used to glue together, usually.

The problem is that more and more people are using scripting languages for this purpose, and it's becoming socially acceptable to do so. The slippery slope being loved by children and idiots alike, one might say "I know Perl, let's use that!

It is C for lazy programmers. I tend to use it for four distinct problem domains:. When I'm done I don't need it any more. Taint is an amazing tool for dealing with untrusted user input. I do QA and Perl is a godsend for writing fuzzers and mutators. In something reall.

The quality of the program structure and the ability to read, maintain and support it are due to the programmer, not Perl. It's call being professional. To which I replied "Perl code can look like C code, but it doesn't have to. Perl code can look like line noise. My old Perl code looked like line noise.

To me, after 6 months. Oh, I could clean it up, but it took me a lot of effort. My Ruby code looks a lot like C; which is nice because half my methods are also implemented in C.

And I can easily read it, even years later. There is so much overlap between the use cases of Perl and Ruby it just didn't make sense to me to keep using Perl since I suck at making it maintainable; it is just so expressive, it is too easy to let the nee. Show me a person who hates Perl, and I'll show you a person who doesn't grok regex.

Clear code with comments. Perl was my first scripting language, and quickly moved to PHP as it's easier for web based development. This was in the late 90's. Now I've moved on to bigger, better languages, but there is a special place in my heart for Perl. I love Perl because everyone hates it. I never said I hated it, just that I would have guessed it was the most hated. Although it isn't my favorite language I really like JavaScript.

Want to see how stupid JQuery people are? Ask them to do something simple without using JQuery. So many times I see a KB library loaded to do one thing that could be done with two lines of normal Javascript. Most senior level front end developers I know nearly refuse to write boilerplate JavaScript because of browser compatibility concerns. Using a library where someone else deals with those issues is generally favorable, even if it means needing to load an 82 KB library for a single function call.

The time it takes a developer to decide if those 82 KB are necessary is n. Sure there is. If you come from a Smalltalk or Self background, the lack of sane support for numbers is a good reason to hate JavaScript.

Smalltalk had a rich set of integer and floating point types, and the default integer kind was automatically promoted to a BigInt object on overflow. In contrast, JavaScript has only one numeric type, a double-precision floating point value. Trying to efficiently represent a bit integer in JavaScript is basically impossible, trying to support arbitrary-precision integers is horrible pain. Lisp and Smalltalk had these from the start. Then there's the lack of portable support for sane forwarding until very recently.

In Smalltalk, if you call a method that doesn't exist, then the invocation is wrapped in an object and passed to the doesNotUnderstand: method. This lets you do proxy things transparently and easily. In JavaScript, this used to be impossible. Then there's the not-quite-pure-OO nature.

Everything is an object, but some of the operations can't be modified and some objects e. Or the fact that you have a single immutable prototype chain. Many of us who know perl and think you're a hypersensitive snowflake of a developer learned C before we learned Perl. What's wrong with Ruby? I find it a bit weird, but not hate-worthy. A write-only language. Perl is ONLY useful today as a server-sided processing script. If you are using Perl on your front end, you will get dependency hell as your server updates things arbitrarily.

Thus if you don't update Perl and everything that uses Perl at the same time, mass-breakage. Thus "Don't update Perl you moron". To that end PHP is on the other side of that coin. PHP is only useful for websites and nothing else. If you run PHP as a backend script it will typically time out, or run out of memory, because it's literately not designed to live very long. Unfortunately the monkeys that make Wordpress themes, plugins, and "frameworks" for PHP don't understand this. Symfony is popular, Symfony also is a huge fucking pain in the ass.

Doctrine, gobbles up memory and gets exponentially slower the longer the process runs. Thus "Don't update Wordpress" mantra, because good lord there are a lot of shitty plugins and themes.

PHP's only saving grace is that they don't break shit to cause dependency hell, they just break API's arbitrarily, thus rendering old PHP code broken until you update it, or abandon it. Ruby is a poor all-purpose tool. In order to use it with the web, you basically need to have the equivalent of php-fpm for Ruby running, and if your server is exhausted, just like php, it just rolls over and dies. Ruby developers are just like Python developers next in that they don't fundamentally understand what they are doing , and leave crashed processes running perpetually.

At least PHP gets a force-kill after a while. Ruby Gems create another dependency hell. In fact good luck getting Ruby on a CentOS installation, it will be obsolete and broken. Python, has all the worst of Perl's dependency hell with Ruby's clueless developers.

Python simply doesn't exist on the web, but good lord so many "build tools" love to use it, and when it gets depreciated, whole projects that aren't even developed in Python, stop working. Hey it's Javascript, everyone loves javascript. If you're not competent enough to write Javascript, turn in your developers license.

Despite that, just like Perl, Ruby and Python, setting up a build environment is an annoying pain in the ass. Stick to the web browser and don't bother with it. Java is another language that sometimes pops up on servers, but it's more common in finance and math projects, which are usually secretive.

Java, just like everything mentioned, breaks shit with every update. C is the only languages that haven't adopted the "break shit with every update" because C can not be "improved" on any level. Most of what has been added to the C API deals with threading and string handling.

At the very basics, anything written in C can compile on everything as long as the platform has the same functions built into the runtime. Which isn't true when cross-compiling between Linux and Windows. Windows doesn't "main " while Linux has a bunch of posix functions that don't exist on Windows. Ultimately the reasons all these languages suck comes right back to dependency hell. A language that has a complete API, requiring no libraries, simply doesn't exist, and isn't future proof anyways.

People hate a lot of these languages because they don't adhere to certain programming habits they have, like object oriented "overide-bullshit", abuse of global variables, or strongly typed languages.

Thus what should work in X language, doesn't work in Y language, because that language simply does it differently. Like weakly typed languages are probably supreme, at the expense of runtime performance, because it results in less errors. In a strong type language, you can't fuck that up. What you describe is no different than if your app uses a c runtime library that is over written by the system during an update. You can write Forth code that is readable.

Once you've got the reverse notation figured out it is very simple to deal with. The real problem with Perl is that the same variable name can mean many different things depending upon the prefix character and the context in which it is used. This can lead to a lot of subtle bugs, leads to a steep learning curve, and even a few months of vacation from the language can result in being unable to read one's own code.

On the other hand, Perl was never designed to be a typical computer language. I was berated by Larry Wall over this, he told me "you computer scientists are all alike". His goal was to get a flexible and powerful scripting language that can be used to get the job done. And it does just that - people use Perl because it can get stuff done. Yes, it's an ugly syntax but it's strong underneath, like the Lou Ferrigno of programming languages.

Ruby was inspired by Perl, among other languages. Glaring example, T-SQL table variables can be used anywhere like any other table and the performance is optimized. Another thing that drives me nuts is MSSQL's query optimizer very rarely ever gets it wrong but you routinely have to specify optimizer hints in Oracle because thei.

Given Oracle's licensing enforcement, choosing their database is usually a major failure in your execution plan all on its own. I am a Java developer working with a. NET team. There may be more comments in this discussion. Without JavaScript enabled, you might want to turn on Classic Discussion System in your preferences instead. Try the CryptoTab Browser. It works like a regular web browser but mines Bitcoin for you while you browse!

Works on all devices. Do you develop on GitHub? You can keep using GitHub but automatically sync your GitHub releases to SourceForge quickly and easily with this tool and take advantage of SourceForge's massive reach.

Follow Slashdot on LinkedIn. Thomas Claburn, writing for The Register: Developers really dislike Perl, and projects associated with Microsoft, at least among those who volunteer their views through Stack Overflow. The community coding site offers programmers a way to document their technical affinities on their developer story profile pages. Included therein is an input box for tech they'd prefer to avoid.

For developers who have chosen to provide testaments of loathing, Perl tops the list of disliked programming languages, followed by Delphi and VBA. The yardstick here consists of the ratio of "likes" and "dislikes" listed in developer story profiles; to merit chart position, the topic or tag in question had to show up in at least 2, stories. In a blog post seen by The Register ahead of its publication today, Stack Overflow data scientist David Robinson said usually there's a relationship between how fast a particular tag is growing and how often it's disliked.

This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted. Full Abbreviated Hidden. More Login. Problems Score: 5 , Funny. You have a problem and you think Perl provides the solution. Now you have two problems.

Share twitter facebook. Re: Score: 3. Score: 3. I guess it's gone that far out of the mainstream. Score: 4 , Informative.

If you look at the original article [stackoverflow. Parent Share twitter facebook. Score: 4 , Insightful. Perl is easy to write, hard to write well. Sort of like death metal.