Dwindling CPAN Releases

That being said, I'm a professional dev and we own a decent amount of perl. That codebase is by far the most difficult to work in out of anything we own. New hires have trouble with it (nobody learns perl these days). Lots of it is next to unreadable.

I agree that like any other language, perl can be written well and can be written poorly. That being said, perl makes it _really_ easy to write something poorly, in contrast to something like python which is a bit more rigid and tries to have one right way to do things.

I still use perl pretty extensively for little one liners, but at this point we are actively trying to get rid of as much perl that we own as possible. We find that rarely writing anything longer than 10 lines should be done in perl, if only from a readability and maintainability standpoint.

I love perl. It was THE game changer for many many years. But perl is falling out of fashion quick.

I'd have no problem working in the language with some very rigid guidelines and a bunch of experts.

But the reality is that nobody is hiring perl experts, perl experts are becoming more and more scarce, and most new hires have a bit of experience with py or rb. I dont dislike perl, I'd just argue it's almost always the wrong thing tool for the job these days.

In a previous life I worked at a large E commerce company. You've likely ordered from them. Pretty much everything ran on perl/perl Mason for over a decade. At that time perl was the cool new thing that everyone wanted to pick up. Now (or when I left a few years back), most of that code represented a liability if it needed to be changed.

IMO this is just the cycle of a programming language.

I remember reading Spolsky articles where he talks about VB6 like it's some shiny new amazing scripting language, akin to python 10 or so years ago. But alas, time moves on and so do most programmers.

I would totally agree.

I learned Perl after first learning Basic(and Visual Basic) then Java.

Coming from Java meant that I always tried to use clear variable names, good comments, broke my code into small and simple functions etc. I repeatedly had people say to me "Wow! I didn't know you could do that in Perl!"

A lot of Perl's bad reputation came from sysadmins and other busy folks who either weren't familiar with good syntax or were in a hurry and basically were playing Perl Golf to get things done quickly. This is probably where the line "Perl is a write only language" came from.

I will concede that Python and it's forced indenting leads to much easier to read code for beginners. That being said, trying to understand what's going on with advanced Pandas usage written by Numpy wizards is no walk in the park either.

I also totally agree that the Perl one liner is still my go to even though I do everything else in Python these days.

The biggest problem I have with Perl is like C++, the language is so stupidly big that every single programmer knows a different subset of the language.

I used to bump into this problem when I was interviewing for VLSI jobs and somebody would always do the "Let's talk about Perl" round. I was quite fluent at Perl at the time, and there would ALWAYS be some idiom that would stump me.

I solved this by bringing my own Perl program on a printout with me--I also brought the Python version of the same program with me. Suddenly, the interviewer was in MY subset of Perl and almost always went "Oh, you're a lot better at Perl and programming than I am" instead of dinging me for not knowing weird Perl trivia.

Recent Perl versions have function signatures.

Have you tried the Test2 test suite? It’s a tremendous improvement over the previous system.

Type::Tiny is an amazing library that provides a rather nice type system.

It's pretty sad too because I distinctly remember that one of the main selling points of Perl when I started using it in the early 2000's was that CPAN was more complete and diverse than any other scripting language out there.

I've been searching for alternatives for about 10 years now, at first because my novice self was heaving headaches reading other people code and even my own. I hated perl but I hated everything else even more as I came to know them. No autovivification? Some assignments copy the data and some create references and you need to memorize the conventions of which does what? 3x to 10x lower performance? My program crashes because of white space? Fuck that! Back to perl5.

I'm sorry to say nothing can replace perl5 for me even now in 2019. I wish something would come along even if it takes years. We need alternatives and competition, perl5 will get too old at some point and 6 is... I don't even want to go there.

I've just written a utility I needed in Perl. I tend to think about some things in the long term, and this utility is something I want to be able to run 10 years from now.

[it's a concistency checker (hasher) for file archives, to find out if the bits in your copy are really the ones you put there, important for multi-GB photo archives — see https://github.com/jwr/ccheck]

I do most of my programming in Clojure, which has excellent backwards compatibility and takes a long-term perspective. I still run some unmodified Clojure code from 8 years ago. And yet for really long term stuff, I would much rather write it in Perl. It has been around for a very long time, is very mature, and can be expected to last, even if it isn't the latest fashionable trend.

Take a look at the various programming languages+environments around you: there will be very few where you can expect to be able to run your code even 2-3 years from now, much less decades later.

That is a python design principle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zen_of_Python

Now there are multiple (sometimes very confusing) ways to import stuff in python, so I am not quite sure if this principle is being followed.

https://realpython.com/absolute-vs-relative-python-imports/

1) Works

2) Is ubiquitous

3) Is stable

4) Is normal (semicolons, braces etc)

Before that I was a huge Perl fan. I even ran a localized version of perl.cctld in my country. With documentation in our local language.

doesn't this apply to python, although now there are additional competitors?

> reinvented itself as a web language (Mojolicious, Plack).

highly opinionated and potentially flame creating , but -

perl was the original web language in the CGI era, PHP pretty much dethroned it due to simplicity of server integration, rails knocked them both out of 'leading edge', then the Node/SPA era arrived.

mojolicious / plack are pretty much things to bring perl up to date w/r/t the 'rails' type

I remember the time before Irssi, when even CLI clients regularly had remotely exploitable vulnerabilities in them (including the 1337 BitchX). Irssi was programmed with safety in mind. Either way, scripts increase attack surface.

I'm not using IRC clients right now (I quit after realizing more than 50 windows open isn't productive), but I really love both Irssi and Weechat's interface (including default themes) and CLI. Did have to finegrain the configs but the same's true about nearly any application these days.

I have a crontab that runs every five minutes: 30 lines that use one CPAN module, no bugs in years. The code has the kind of hackiness that's okay when it fits on one screen, and it fits on one screen precisely because of that hackiness.

Personally, I don't tend to have a hard time reading code I myself wrote, even long after the fact. But I will concede that Perl code _can be_ hard to read if the author has been too clever.

That's the coder, not the language.

Which is more obvious what's happening.

  print ''.join('%(pre)s%(num)s %(bot)s on the wall, %(nul)s %(bot)s,\n%(tak)s\n' % (lambda c,b: {'pre':['','%s %s on the wall.\n\n' % (c,b)][abs(cmp(c,'Ninety-nine'))], 'num':c, 'nul':c.lower(), 'bot':b, 'tak':['Go to the store and buy some more... Ninety-nine %s.' % b,'Take one down, pass it around,'][abs(cmp(x,0))] })((lambda x,o: [(['Twenty','Thirty','Forty','Fifty', 'Sixty','Seventy','Eighty','Ninety'][x/10-2]+'-'+o.lower()).replace('-no more',''), o][int(x<20)])(x, ['No more','One','Two', 'Three','Four','Five','Six','Seven','Eight', 'Nine','Ten','Eleven','Twelve','Thirteen','Fourteen', 'Fifteen','Sixteen','Seventeen','Eighteen','Nineteen'][[x,x%10][int(x>=20)]]),'bottle%s of beer' % ['','s'][abs(cmp(x,1))]) for x in xrange(99,-1,-1))

  my $firstline = 1;
 my @tens = qw/Ninety Eighty Seventy Sixty Fifty Forty Thirty Twenty/;
 my @teens = qw/Nineteen Eighteen Seventeen Sixteen Fifteen Fourteen Thirteen Twelve Eleven Ten/;
 my @ones = qw/Nine Eight Seven Six Five Four Three Two One/;

  sub go {
     my $num = shift;
     my $bottles = "bottles";
     if ($num eq "One") {
         $bottles = "bottle";
     }
     if ($firstline == 0) {
         print "$num $bottles of beer on the wall.\n";
         print "\n";
     }
     $firstline = 0;

     print "$num $bottles of beer on the wall, ".lc($num)." $bottles of beer,\n";
     print "Take one down, pass it around,\n";
     if ($num eq "One") {
         print "No more bottles of beer on the wall.\n";
         print "\n";
     }
 }
     
 foreach my $ten (@tens) {
     foreach my $one (@ones) {
         go("$ten-".lc($one));
     }
     go($ten);
 }
 foreach my $teen (@teens) {
     go($teen);
 }
 foreach my $one (@ones) {
     go($one);
 }
 
 print "No more bottles of beer on the wall, no more bottles of beer,\n";
 print "Go to the store and buy some more... Ninety-nine bottles of beer.\n";
 print "\n";