Comment by jb1991
3 years ago
Perl is really one of the best languages and in modern times is underrated. I've been using it in production for most of my critical services since about 2012. I've used many other languages since then but always keep coming back to perl. It's a true gem of a language.
It's grand child, Raku, also seems to be an impressive language actually. Hated by Perlers and non-Perlers alike, it actually would be a great environment to build powerful programs in:
https://www.oreilly.com/library/view/learning-perl-6/9781491...
>>Hated by Perlers and non-Perlers alike
Wrong. Perlers still cheer for it.
But for some reasons it hasn't wide spread adoption yet. We hope to use it some day in production.
https://raku.org
I messed around with Raku and it is seriously underrated. If anyone hasn't yet I would recommend giving it a try. It still does all the cool stuff Perl 5 can do but with the features you would expect from a modern language baked in. Raku and the core modules are solid and can be used in production but unfortunately the overall ecosystem is still struggling. 3rd party modules can be hit or miss. I found several of them weren't well maintained or seemed abandoned.
Yeah I wish Raku would pick up some steam. It’s the only newish language I’ve looked at that’s made me say wow and it cleans up some of the thorny Perl5 sigil issues.
I always liked the sigils :-)
When I was first learning to program and picked up Perl 5 (I was interested in Web programming, so... that was the thing to learn at the time) and then later read some books (yes, kids, we used to read books) on Java and C++, I wondered how the hell anyone could make sense of them. And hacking up early Javascript snippets (you know, for image rollovers, the only thing anyone used it for for the first few years) was so painful. It's just words! There's nothing to indicate what anything is! The examples in the books were so hard to read.
The answer, of course, was "they use syntax highlighting", but I'd not made that discovery yet.
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I don't think anyone hates it, but there were many people who were looking for a solid release that ran fast-enough. There was also... drama, which I feel no one cares for.
This is a pretty remarkably bitter and uncharitable take, given that Raku is the original intended successor of Perl, created by Perl's author, and sharing a lot of the "spirit" of Perl.
That ship sailed, I won't argue it, and I'm not personally invested in either "camp", but in a thread saying "Hey, Perl is actually a pretty cool language!", I think a short mention of Raku isn't worth this reaction.
That's what I meant when I said Perlers hate Rakuans. It's an intersting example of "The People's Front of Judea" vs. "The Judean People's Front".
I hope you gain inner peace one day again.
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I admit the only time I reach for Perl is when I need a really strong and dependable regex service. Still one of the best ways to parse text to this day. Perl text parsing capabilities are nearly unrivaled still.
What do you typically use perl for? I thought it was most commonly used for scripting and running cgi scripts. I find bash to be much more readable and tend to use it or python for most of my scripts
> I find bash to be much more readable
Lol, you find bash readable? With all its weird ad-hoc constructs? I don’t pretend Perl looks pretty but at least its constructs seem to be consciously designed and do not look bolted on.
At my work place we still maintain a huge web application written in Perl 5. Most of the time if we are in trouble it‘s due to bad architectural designs that are not specific to Perl as a language or ecosystem. Only rarely I stumble over issues like implicit returns, or context sensitive sub routines. Also I hate Perl 5 allowing circular includes. The worst offenders among in-house modules are Perl modules written in a Java-esque style which mostly would have benefitted well from using native Perl features instead of trying to mimick Java programs.
>> I find bash to be much more readable
> Lol, you find bash readable?
Note, they didn't say it was readable, just more readable.
What does Perl do in the web app?
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The sad thing is that once, a while ago, there was an attempt to compete with the new market of scripting languages (Perl, Tcl) from a shell perspective. The result being Korn Shell, especially ksh93, and tools like dtksh (which allowed Motif UI apps to be written in shell).
Compared to that, bash is really anemic.
Python took Perl's money a bit when it came to scripting, Ruby – clearly influenced a lot by Perl – made big grounds in web apps, once they outgrew CGIs, and of course then we collectively got Javascript Stockholm syndrome.
But seriously, they're all good dogs. We all revel in the Narcicissm of Small Differences, but in the end it wouldn't really matter if we used Perl instead of Python or any other algol-ish imperative OO language with some functional bits.
I learned Perl in the mid-1990's. I'm in semiconductor design and most of our CAD tools use Tcl so I write a lot of that but for any text report processing or sysadmin type tasks I write in Perl. I've got nothing against Python. I learned enough of it and it is fine. If I was writing larger systems I would probably use Python.
Depending on the task to be solved, a Bash script (using AWK, Coreutils etc.) executes much slower than the correspinding Perl or Python script, and having to run slow scripts often interactively can have a strong negative impact on developer productivity, especially on flow state (of mind).
BSD grep vs GNU grep has burned me enough times that when I do anything moderately complex in a bash script, I quickly move to Perl. And since Perl is installed most everywhere (or can be bundled up easily with PAR::Packer), it's an easy decision for me.