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Comment by smacktoward | Hacker News Reader

Fifteen years too late. But I suppose better late than never.

Had they done it fifteen years earlier, I think Perl could have been the language to learn for Data Science. It still is a fantastic language to slice, clean up, and extract information from text files, and it was already very widely used in bioinformatics.

I don't think the name change was the problem here, rather it wasn't complete until recently.

See the section about waiting for perl 6 before doing more work...

http://blogs.perl.org/users/ovid/2019/08/is-perl-6-being-ren...

"a fantastic language to slice, clean up, and extract information from text files, and it was already very widely used in bioinformatics" is a description of Perl 5, not Perl 6.

Even if Perl 6 is completed, I don't think it is a practical workhorse for many real world situations.

To me being able to create grammars in Perl 6 to parse text data sounds really compelling. However, every time I have played around with them, Perl 6 has been so slow, that I have reverted to using regular expressions in another language.

I'm pretty sure GP is referring to Perl 5, not the newly renamed Raku. Perl 5 had a lot of use in bioinformatics, and to my knowledge lasted quite a while after the general Perl exodus, until eventually being replaced by biopython.

If the confusion regarding Perl 5/6 never happened, it might have retained that popularity in that domain.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Osborne_effect

Yeah, with Perl 6 out of the way, they would have had 15 years to clean up the syntax of Perl 5 so it was no longer indistinguishable from line noise.

IMHO Perl's reputation for noisy code is mostly the result of code golf examples online and denoting variables with an explicit type character.

A sanely written Perl program is nowhere near line noise. Compare to supposedly beautiful languages like Rust and the ratio of punctuation characters to alphanumeric is pretty much on par.

You're right. I find Rust code much harder to comprehend. But the sigils and the arrow operator are kind of annoying. I think Ruby fixed most of Perl's annoyances and created new ones.

Since when is it claimed Rust is beautiful? It's one of the most ugly newer languages

Perl was built on a shaky foundation from the start. It was inevitable that it would collapse under its own weight.

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