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Comment by benbristow | Hacker News Reader

I can’t imagine programming in Perl anymore. I did a bit in a previous job and it was a ball ache trying to remember the syntax and all it’s quirks.

I don’t know why you’d want to use it over other popular scripting languages like JS/Ruby/Python. All have more active communities.

AWS don’t even support Perl

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Perl singlehandedly turned me off of using scripting languages for almost two decades. I stayed with C, C++, and C# and of course used Javascript for the web.

It wasn’t until I was “forced” to learn Python last year and started working heavily with AWS that I actually enjoyed scripting languages again for smallish glue type scripts.

This year I finally started using Node.

But yeah for career reasons, I wouldn’t tie my horse to Perl in 2019.

Non-web developer here... I've personally never seen any Ruby in anything I've ever worked on (only personal, limited anecdote, of course).

Python's nice for gluing more performant native code together (perl XS isn't as straightforward IME). But for text processing I'll take perl every time.

Ruby definitely has its niche in web development mainly due to Rails, Jekyll and Sinatra. Quite a weird choice for other things. Pretty sure Homebrew on Mac uses it.

It’s not the most performant of languages (although it’s definitely getting better).

Homebrew is the only thing I think Ruby is perfect for. It's just a DSL for describing how to fetch and build a program, like Makefiles but more convenient.

Chef is the same kinda thing but for managing infrastructure (like Ansible for Python & Cake for .NET)

https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/configurati...

As the other reply to you said, agreed on the DSL-construction thing. I used a fair bit of Puppet a couple of years ago and that was very much Ruby through and through. What I really liked about it was how easy it was to jump from DSL for general use cases to Ruby for specialized libraries or system Facts.

Some workers complains about their tools.

Other just use whatever, fix problems, and make money.

Until you need your next job and you see spending 10 years doing Perl was detrimental to your career...

Perl has never been central to nor a requirement of my jobs, but it has always helped me immensely.

-As a web developer, I use it to write all sorts of small webservices and file conversion utilities;

-As a embedded system developer, I used it to integrate with other services in the network;

-As a sysadmin and DBA, I use it a lot to parse all sorts of data.

The downside is that I have to put up with the little jokes and criticisms. Then again, more than once I've been called because I was the only one who could do some job fast enough.

At least it's fun to write modern Perl code compared to Js which is kind of annoying. Raku is also a very nice language but it's still too slow and hasn't gained much traction. Someone who's proficient in Perl can probably become productive in Python in less than a month.

I was traditionally the farthest thing from a JS callback hell fanboy, but, using modern JS with async/await and “classes” (yes I realize it’s syntactic sugar, prototypical inheritances, yada yada yada), it’s not bad. I haven’t played with TypeScript in a few years, but I’m looking to get back into it.

But why fool with Perl at all - especially Raku since it’s basically a new language that doesn’t have the widespread support of Python or God forbid PHP?

One fools with Perl if there's legacy Perl infrastructure in production. One does not simply rewrite 20+ kloc of working Perl code into something else just because it's cool. Mojolicious is a good and elegant web framework for modern Perl. I haven't seen anything comparable except maybe in Ruby.

I'm more of a Ruby fan than a Python fan, but Python has Django, Flask, Tornado and others.

https://steelkiwi.com/blog/top-10-python-web-frameworks-to-l...

I know. Django is quite different, maybe Flask is sinatraish but not async afaik. Tornado is async but plain different as well and from what I've read more suited for web APIs. I'd rather use just about any modern Node.js framework than older non async frameworks for Python.

But specifically, why move to Raku for new projects?

I personally think Raku is a poor choice for new projects. I've never heard of anything relatively popular built with it. I get the feeling it's quite a hobbyist platform at this point.

I'd rather use Perl 5 than Raku at the moment. At least Perl 5 has CPAN which is still somewhat alive.

It's a bit like Julia, or Java 1.3, only without the marketing behind it. It's quite capable, definitely not a hobbyst project. Too slow and missing a lot of libraries though. And yes, Perl is still a better choice.

Because of the rational math. For what it's worth it could replace Cobol, although I don't know if that's such a great thing. And maybe because it's a well designed language and a joy to program in, but we already have Ruby for that.

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