Perl Is Back and Ready to Roll with the Big Data Crowd | Hacker News Reader

Perl Is Back and Ready to Roll with the Big Data Crowd

thenewstack.io

10 pointsjoabj5 comments

Too late.

Hardly. Perl gets far more use than you might imagine and in some very interesting places. Anyone who thinks that Perl is dead or dying is a bandwagon fan of the language(s) du jour.

I've been in IT across three decades. Perl is just as useful to me today as it was whilst in college. Just because it isn't in use by all the sock-headed millennial hipsters doesn't mean a thing. I can do more with Perl in fewer lines and with less thought than with Python or Ruby. I like Perl's syntax and I like that it allows me to work with it in a way that works for me. Other languages are not so forgiving in this regard.

Look at the usefulness of CPAN. Perl 6 is analagous to Python 3. It's a different language more or less, but given a bit of time, Perl 6 will be used more and more. I already know people using it. I plan to use it more and more. There are huge swaths of the Internet still built on Perl.

Similarly, I've two decades of Perl under my belt and it remains my go-to to quick-and-dirties. But in my field, Python has the mind-share these days and ease of collaboration beats language puritanism, so Perl's on a one-way trip. The reality is that when people leave Perl, they don't come back.

I hear you, but do you really think the people who spent the last decade+ working on Perl 6 would have done so because of love of the language alone? That would be a terrible waste of time and talent. I think we will see something of a Perl revival when people see just what they can do with Perl 6. I'm hopeful, but at the same time, you yourself know how useful Perl can be for things like one-liner quick, clever hacks and even better yet, I don't think anything beats Perl for rapid prototyping, even if it means the final product is written in C/C++.

While I agree that Python is seemingly everywhere, I don't agree that people don't come back to Perl. Perl 5 gets better every release, and perl6 really is finally around the corner. Lots of exciting stuff coming!!!

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